Kenji Tanigaki’s furious third feature, The Furious, opens globally tomorrow after Lionsgate scooped up the Hong Kong production for international distribution. The pickup follows a Toronto Midnight Madness run in which the film finished second in the People’s Choice voting, a strong result for a slimly plotted but action-crammed martial arts movie.
Toronto Midnight Madness
Second-place in the People’s Choice voting gave The Furious a festival result that travels well beyond the room it played in. Midnight Madness has become a useful proving ground for action titles that rely on momentum, crowd response, and repeatable set pieces rather than prestige signaling, and this one arrived with a clear calling card: hand-to-hand combat, weaponry, and bodily contortions.
The film is a culture-blending Hong Kong production, and that mix is written into the sound as much as the fight design. A good portion of the dialogue is clunkily dubbed in English, while Mandarin, Thai and Tagalog also feature in the film. For a title chasing crossover cult status, that linguistic jumble may be part of the appeal rather than a flaw that needs sanding down.
Xie Miao and Rainy
Xie Miao plays a nameless blue-collar worker stationed in an unnamed country, with Yang Enyou as Rainy, his nine-year-old daughter. Their story is set somewhere in Southeast Asia, but the film uses that geography as a launchpad for a kidnapping thriller, not a map lesson, and the first centerpiece fight scene plays out on the open bed of a moving vehicle.
That sequence sets the film’s terms fast: the father chases a truck in sandals, and the movie keeps tightening around motion, impact, and improvisation. Kensuke Sonomura handled the action choreography, and the result is the kind of barn-burning martial arts movie that can make a distributor’s acquisition look shrewd after the fact.
Lionsgate Pickup
Lionsgate’s international distribution deal gives The Furious a wider route than a festival run alone could provide, especially for a film built on choreography and physical commitment rather than star branding. Tanigaki, working on his third feature, gets a larger audience just as the movie’s noisy mix of dubbing, multiple languages, and stripped-down plotting enters circulation.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: this is the moment the film stops being a Toronto title and starts becoming a global release. If the crowd response in Midnight Madness is any guide, the business bet is that the action does the selling, even when the dialogue does not.
