Inside ‘The Furious’: How Kenji Tanigaki Built an Action Movie That Hits Different After the Epstein Files

If there’s a universal truth to agree upon in our divisive age, it’s that child traffickers are scum of the earth and thus well-positioned to serve as fodder in modern action cinema.

Thus, the premise of Kenji Tanigaki’s new movie, “The Furious“: When mute tradesman Wang Wei’s (Xie Miao) daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), is taken from him in broad daylight by members of just such an organization, he goes on a tear through Bangkok’s criminal underworld to rescue her, brutalizing any man foolish enough to get in his way with precision martial artistry (and his trusty claw hammer) in the process.

No flavor of bodily harm is spared the movie’s cast of anonymous thugs, especially after Wei partners with Navin (Joe Taslim), a journalist likewise in righteous pursuit of a missing loved one: his wife, an investigative reporter who disappeared while following the trafficking ring’s trail. “The Furious” reads like action cinema for its moment, when the details of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes have been publicized in fits and spurts throughout 2026, revealing the depths of not only his and his benefactors’ depravity, but the levers and pulleys that allowed him to manipulate the U.S. justice system. Audiences watching the movie can expect cathartic release in light of these nauseating disclosures. 

Explicitly speaking, though, “The Furious” isn’t contemporary. Epstein’s notoriety isn’t a nucleotide in the film’s DNA, per se, because Tanigaki wanted a villain for his plot whom any viewer would recognize as despicable, no matter what part of the world they live in.

“It’s a kind of coincidence,” Tanigaki told IndieWire, speaking about the release of “The Furious” timing with recent exposures of Epstein’s transgressions. “Actually, there’s a lot of crime happening in Southeast Asia, like in Cambodia or parts of Thailand. As an action movie, we need, of course, good people and bad people, and background-wise, the bad people must be very bad. I can’t include local issues, because that doesn’t work for everyone all over the world. But human trafficking, especially children, we all know that’s bad!” 

‘The Furious’Courtesy of TIFF

In a separate conversation, Xie echoed Tanigaki’s thoughts. “This movie, to me, is about a father who has lost his daughter,” he said. “There are many movies that would choose that kind of story; I think saving the daughter is something everyone around the world can feel the same emotions about.”

To his point, the screenplay, prepared by the quartet of Mak Tin-shu, Lei Zhilong, Shum Kwan-sin, and Frank Hui, makes a profound emotional investment. In a fight sequence set in a seedy nightclub, Wei takes on a veritable cascade of henchmen and lands a savage linear kick that sends one flying; a snap zoom on Wei’s feet shows that he’s wearing the pair of steel-toe boots Rainy gave him earlier in the film. Smack dab amid jaw-dropping stunt after jaw-dropping stunt, “The Furious” invites a tear to the eye as swiftly as a roundhouse to the jaw. 

The proximity between the film’s commercial premiere and January’s Epstein file dump simply gives the impression of timeliness when, in fact, its subject matter is timeless. In any year, in any culture, there are no antagonists (save for Nazis) better suited as action cinema heavies; rooting against child trafficking lowlifes is moral, easy, and best of all, a completely guiltless pleasure. “I hope the audience feels one way,” said Tanigaki. “‘Beat him! Beat him!’ That kind of thing is very important for this movie. Maybe for other movies it’s different.”

“The Furious” hinges on buildup. Wei and Navin comprise the story’s focal points, but emphasis is also placed upon its primary and secondary antagonists: Paklung (Joey Iwanaga), the slick-suited businessman behind the trafficking operation, and Ho (Brian Le), the bullheaded son of one of Paklung’s subordinates. When the quartet collides in the film’s climactic fight, each has his own motivation and a reason to feel white-hot, incandescent rage. Wei wants to save his daughter, Navin wants to avenge his wife, Ho wants to avenge his father, whom Paklung executes earlier in the movie, and Paklung wants to avenge his own pregnant wife, whom he accidentally kills during what can best be described as a business meeting gone sour. (In an instance of classic villain logic, Paklung blames Wei and Navin for her death rather than accepting accountability. That’s projection at its finest.)

That, for Tanigaki, is the conclusion to the film’s thesis. “In the ending, everybody is furious for their own reason, and we need that energy,” Tanigaki said. “We can have lots of different kinds of action movies, but for our type of action, we need energy, and we need anger. When you watch a Bruce Lee movie, you want to be like Bruce Lee when you leave the theater, or when you watch a Tom Cruise movie.”

‘The Furious’Lionsgate

When you watch “The Furious,” in other words, maybe you’ll leave the theater wanting to be like Wei, the kind of person who’d go to Hell and back to protect their kid. Tanigaki isn’t looking for base reactions, though, and his intention isn’t to inspire audiences to chase down criminals. What he’s doing with “The Furious” is more emotional than visceral, because the action comes from an emotional place for all of his characters. 

Xie bakes that dynamic into his performance. He’s a father himself; he understands Wei’s anguish at Rainy’s kidnapping. The way he conveys that, though, is intrinsically tied to choreography and action. “It’s very easy to understand a father who lost his daughter, how painful that is,” Xie said. “It’s harder to pinpoint a person who cannot speak what level his suffering actually reaches, because this character cannot express his anger in words. So his actions will be more extreme than ordinary people.”

To Xie’s point, Wei shows little to no mercy to his opponents, whether they’re rank and file in Paklung’s sprawling empire or enjoy authority within its hierarchy. He can’t say aloud what Navin can, for instance, whose grief over his wife is articulated through dialogue. So Wei communicates his sentiments with bruised bodies and broken bones.

“That’s the starting point for how we choreograph,” Tanigaki said. “Choreography is the dialogue of the action scenes. Actors remember their dialogue, and they put it into their own words; they digest by themselves. The same process happens in action scenes. Because we have a month and a half or two months to rehearse, we talk every day, not only about the choreography, but the characters, emotions, and how much of the energy is tired or fresh.”

He added, “It’s a motion picture, but it must also be an emotion picture. Most of the fights happen at the peak of the emotion. That’s why emotion is very important.” 

‘The Furious’©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection

You’d think Xie might put greater stock in choreography as an actor and martial artist; you’d be partly mistaken. For him, the value of sharp choreography is determined on a case-by-case basis.

“We have different choreography across many different scenes,” Xie said. “In every take, we want to show the audience something different. In the final five-person battle, that’s where we need to show the audience absolutely spectacular action arrangements; in the bicycle battle (between Wei and Paklung), there’s an emotional extension in that scene. The choreography, the moves, aren’t as important. It’s just two extremely angry people struggling together like animals.”

Wei spends “The Furious” in that “spectacular” mode until he goes mano a mano with Paklung in the pouring rain; up to that point, Paklung likewise functions as a martial arts machine, effortlessly matching Wei and Navin’s every move — a seemingly unbeatable foe. But his solo brawl with Wei is all about sensation. Here, impeccable choreography holds far less power than raw, naked performances. 

Seeing both characters laid emotionally bare drives home an important motif in “The Furious”: justice and how it is achieved in a society where authority is easily corrupted. Paklung has Bangkok’s police chief in his pocket. No one with either the legal responsibility or power to recover Rainy lifts so much as a finger to do so; Wei takes that mission upon himself partly because that’s what a father would do for his daughter, and partly because if he doesn’t, who will?

“In this kind of human trafficking, especially with children, no one has justice on their side,” Tanigaki said. “Maybe the opening to justice is another form of justice.” If there are different kinds of action movies, after all, then it stands to reason that there are also different kinds of justice, a concept near to the heart of action cinema writ large.

 “Justice is a very important part [of action],” Xie said. “If you notice, even if the characters [in ‘The Furious’] don’t have great martial arts skills at first, they’re on the side of justice–and in the end, that keeps growing until he can overcome evil.” 

“The Furious” is now in theaters from Lionsgate.