The Furious wastes absolutely no time establishing whom audiences should cheer for and whom to despise. Within its opening minutes, a journalist (Jeeja Yanin) sneaks into a vile child trafficking operation’s warehouse, where she rescues a young boy by delivering a barrage of punches, kicks, and ruthless blows to the henchmen inside. It’s an extreme high punctured by tragedy, as the journalist watches the execution of the kid in cold blood by our villains, who treat this death as a frustrating inconvenience at best. There’s your excuse to wish the full John Wick treatment on this entire operation.

The film’s most direct comparison, of course, is 2011’s The Raid: Redemption, which redefined simple yet effortlessly brutal action for international audiences thanks to its no-holds-barred combat style. Every single brawl was jaw-dropping in construction, cinematography, and execution, delivering fights you just could not believe existed and were not for the squeamish. Judged by its action alone, The Furious is a more than worthy spiritual successor to “The Raid” movies—even reuniting several “Raid” actors in its cast—delivering easily the best action movie of 2026 by a mile. At the same time, the movie works so long as director Kenji Tanigaki keeps this premise within broad archetypes, and only when The Furious tries to go beyond a fitting endpoint do the beatdowns start to drag out.

The hero falls into the parameters of an everyman who may or may not have a dark past that explains his shocking finesse at kicking ass. We don’t know why Wang Wei (Xie Miao) is mute, or how he received a particularly visible head wound, but Wang is content as the local handyman, fixing businesses across town with his young daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou). It’s their last few days together before Rainy goes back to her mom, but she just wants her dad to pay more attention, even acknowledging she only practices kung fu because it’s something they did together. Unfortunately, right after storming out on him after an arguement, she’s led into a trap by traffickers, forcing Wang to chase after the kidnappers.

Whether the police are corrupt or simply unwilling to break protocol, Wang decides to investigate matters on his own. In the process, he runs into the cigarette-chomping Navin (Joe Taslim), who’s infiltrated the traffickers to learn what happened to his wife, the same journalist who disappeared while investigating their operations. Like Wang, Navin is very good at knocking heads while surviving waves of heavily armed thugs. After realizing they’re on the same side, both men team up to discover information about their loved ones and bring the operation down—a task that largely serves as an excuse to deliver the coolest martial arts badassery you’ll see outside of the “Ip Man” franchise.

Words can’t begin to describe how epic, powerful, and absolutely bone-crushing the fights are. Wang doesn’t just do battle in an MMA cage; he climbs a giant dogpile made of goons while incapacitating them with a hammer. A brawl in an ice factory sees Wang and Navin battle a massive henchman (Brian Le) wielding a sledgehammer while sidestepping ice blocks containing the frozen bodies of past victims. Even a mid-act set piece directly homages The Raid, where our heroes take on an entire building full of henchmen to rescue Rainy and the kids she befriended. In layman’s terms, when the fists are flying, this movie rocks.

If jaw-dropping fights are all you’re craving, you’ll leave The Furious satisfied. Sadly, after a certain point, the movie reaches what feels like a satisfying conclusion but decides to keep going, creating an additional motivation for the sociopath (Joey Iwanaga) running this operation to track down our heroes with his second-in-command (Yayan Ruhian). As a result, the final battle can’t help but feel padded, even as its climactic five-man brawl delivers on showcasing each fighter’s talents in ways that’ll leave your jaw on the floor. It’s a bit like eating too many sweets: You wish you had stopped earlier, but it feels so good in the moment.

This makes grading The Furious somewhat odd. The movie delivers at least 90 minutes of action-movie perfection before stitching on a great yet bloated add-on, adopting a level of seriousness it didn’t require beforehand. The movie is at its best when embracing simplicity, paradoxically by making each complex fight look like a cakewalk to pull off. It might not have the most consistent narrative, but The Furious’s status as a new benchmark for pure martial arts action filmmaking can’t be ignored.