Furie (2019)

Furie (2019)

 

Starring: Veronica Ngo Thanh Van, Mai Cát Vi, Thanh Nhien Phan, Pham Anh Khoa, Kim Long Thach, Khanh Ngoc Mai, Hoa Thanh
Director: Le-Van Kiet
Action Directors: Kefi Abrikh, Yannick Ben, Marc David, Raimundo Querido

 

Vietnamese action cinema was looking promising in the late 2000s. The Rebel, which featured the strong martial arts cast of Johnny Tri Nguyen, Dustin Nguyen, and tonight’s star Veronica Ngo, was a great martial arts film with a strong plot and great fights. Two years later, Johnny and Veronica teamed up again for Clash, which was also a very good martial arts-action film. Shortly afterward, Dustin and Veronica teamed up for the (relatively) big-budget fantasy-epic Once Upon a Time in Vietnam. Unfortunately, at the same time, Vietnamese censors banned Johnny Tri Nguyen’s very personal project, Chinatown, which meant that it couldn’t get an international release, either. Johnny Tri Nguyen left the film industry in disgust and we were thus robbed of one of the great screen fighters of the 21^st century. We didn’t hear much out of Vietnam afterward—although both Dustin Nguyen and Veronica Ngo continued getting work outside of Vietnam—until 2019, with the release of Furie.

Hai Phuong (Veronica Ngo, who had roles in The Old Guard and Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi) is the daughter of well-known master of Vietnamese martial arts. Unfortunately, at the end of her adolescence, Phuong leaves home to be with her boyfriend of questionable morals, getting disowned by daddy in the process. As you can expect, a boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks is never a good idea, and Phuong ends up working at a girl’s bar and ultimately gets pregnant out of wedlock.

Ten years later, Hai Phuong and her daughter, Mai (Mai Cát Vi), are now living in some small fishing village a sizeable distance from Saigon. Hai Phuong is eking out a living as a debt collector for the local loan shark, which has earned her an understandably negative reputation among the locals. The womenfolk dismiss Phuong as a whore for not only being a single mother, but for (gasp!) not being married despite being in her late 30s—the hussy! Mai’s schoolmates harass her on a daily basis, and Mai now wants her mom to get into a more respectable profession. A potentially-violent encounter with the relative of one her recent targets convinces Hai Phuong that Mai may have a point.

The next day, Hai Phuong takes some pearl earrings into the village to pawn off in order to buy a fishing boat. Two things happen that will change Hai Phuong’s life forever: first, Mai is accused of stealing a wallet by the busybody women of the local market. The resulting argument ends with Mai telling mommy “I hate you” and running away. Then, a gang of organ traffickers visits the village and absconds with Mai. Despite Hai Phuong’s martial arts skillz, she is unable to rescue her daughter. So, she follows the kidnappers to Saigon and begins a relentless search for her daughter, before it’s too late.

Furie is a strong action-thriller vehicle for actress Veronica Ngo, who also produced the feature. In her earlier movies, she got ample time to demonstrate her fighting talents, but was still second fiddle to her male co-stars. Here she is the center of attention and not only gets to beat the hell out of the Vietnamese underworld, but show off her acting chops, too. To be fair, she had her moments of emotion in both Clash and The Rebel, but this is tour-de-force for Miss Ngo. There is a strong male supporting character in the form of police detective Luong (Thanh Nien Phan), but he doesn’t show up until the second act and doesn’t have anything to do until the climax.

The story is pretty standard child trafficking fare, which we’ve seen in films like Taken; Out of Reach or Skin Trade, with an emphasis on the organ theft aspect of the industry, which had been done recently in movies like SPL 2: A Time for Consequences and Paradox. In this case, we spend enough time with the character of Mai that we can feel for her once she is kidnapped, while the process of transporting and organ-robbing the children is explained in such a way that we know that she only has a few hours to get rescued before she bites it. With stakes this high, the suspense factor is high and every moment that Hai Phuong loses brings her one step closer to absolute tragedy. And since most Asian action movies DO NOT screw around, you just know that they go there if they think they need to.

The action scenes were staged and directed by the quartet of Kefi Abrikh, Yannick Ben, Marc David and Raimundo Querido. All four are French martial artists who have done a lot of stuntwork in diverse European productions, and Abrikh recently choreographed the fights for the female empowerment fairy tale The Princess (from earlier this year). They do a respectable job on the fight scenes, which range from “good” to “great.” There are two showstoppers among the fights. The first pits Veronica Ngo against a former member of the gang, who now runs a motorcycle chopshop, played by The Lady Assassin’s Pham Anh Hoa. It’s a complicated scuffle inside a very small house as the two fight with tools, with the latter’s mother in the background pleading for both parties to stop. It plays like the brutal Indonesian equivalent of a Jackie Chan fight, as they use wrenches, screwdriver and a hammer, and often perform complex movements in order to get a tool away from the other without losing it themselves.

The big showdown pits Veronica against the female leader of the child traffickers, played by Hoa Thanh. Veronica’s Hai Phuong character had already had one scuffle against this lady, who has the structure of a bodybuilder and the fighting skills to boot. Their second and final confrontation takes place on a train that is quickly arriving at the drop-off point for the children: if Hai Phuong doesn’t win here, it’s all over for Mai and other other children. What ensues is the 2019 equivalent to the famous Joyce Mina Godenzi/Agnes Aurelio showdown from She Shoots Straight (with a dash of The Raid 2). Can Hai Phuong’s maternal instincts triumph over Hoa Thanh’s brute strength?

If you have watched movies like Clash and The Rebel, you know that Vietnamese movies take no prisoners in the context of the storyline. Just knowing that there is never a guarantee of the infamous trope of the Hero’s Battle Death Exemption, in which a character is often outmatched by the villain (or monster or killer) will survive just because they’re the hero. So when Hoa Thanh starts beating the heck out of Hai Phuong during the finale, there is a honest chance that the latter will not make it out alive, or will not win in time. And this uncertainty carries on right to the last scene, always keeping the characters’ fates up in the air. Thus, Furie doesn’t do anything new, but it does it with the right doses of righteous ass-kicking and suspense, thus meriting a recommendation.