Furies (2022)

Furies (2022)
Vietnamese Title: Thanh Sói
Translation: Thanh the Wolf (proper name)

 

Starring: Dong Anh Quynh, Toc Tien, Thuan Nguyen, Veronica Ngo, Rima Thanh, Song Luan, Gi A Nguyen, Thanh Nhien Phan
Director: Veronica Ngo Thanh Van
Action Director: Kefi Abrikh, Yannick Ben

 

The first Furie was a resounding success in its native Vietnam, becoming the most successful domestic film of all time. And considering its warm welcome in other countries, it went without saying that a sequel would be in the works soon. This time, singer-actress Veronica Ngo, who had produced and starred in the first film, would take on the directing duties. The project was announced as a prequel to the first film. Interestingly enough (for me), that is the last I really followed the film until it came out on Netflix. I knew it was a prequel and naturally assumed it would be about Veronica Ngo’s Hai Phuong character. Instead, it is an origin story to the tough-as-nails villain Phạm Thị Châu Thanh. I honestly thought that was a twist, but while prepping for this review, I saw that this detail was in plain sight on the IMDB. I guess I should feel silly for thinking it was a twist in the first place.

The film revolves a girl named Bi (Dong Ahn Quynh), the daughter of a prostitute. Her mother turns tricks in order to get her daughter into school with the hopes of Bi getting a good job and the two out of poverty. Those hopes are dashed to pieces when one of her mother’s clients shows up drunk and rapes Bi—yes, this film depicts child rape. The resulting scuffle between Bi, the John and Bi’s mother leaves the latter two dead and Bi left to her own devices.

She takes the first bus to Saigon and (unsurprisingly) ends up on the streets. She supports herself through pickpocketing and hawking food, which quickly earns her the ire of the local extortion gang running that particular street. They try to rape her (oh dear, I need an adult), but she is rescued by a mysterious woman named Jaqueline (Veronica Ngo, of Clash and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny). Jaqueline takes Bi under her wing and gives her food and shelter at an apartment located above a small ramen shop. Also living with Bi are two other young women: Hong (Rima Thanh Vy, of Muoi: The Curse Returns) and Thanh (Toc Tien). Hong was once raped by a train of ten men, while Thanh is a former prostitute. Jaqueline trains them in the martial arts so that they may rise up against the gangs in Saigon that specialize in trafficking women.

The gang that Jaqueline has in mind is led by a nutcase named Hai Cho Dien (Thuan Nguyen). He has three Lieutenants in his organization: Son (Gi A Nguyen), his bodyguard; Long (Song Luan), the drug distributor; and Teo (Thanh Nien Phan), who handles the human trafficking. Before Bi can join the effort to take these men down, she must complete her training alongside her new “sisters.” Hong, who is more chipper and fashion-minded than Thanh, warms to Bi quite quickly. Thanh is a tougher nut to crack, although her own personal darkness mirrors Bi’s own demons, which eventually forges a real bond of sisterhood to them.

Their initial mission—take out Teo and rescue a shipment of adolescent girls—is a success. It is at that point that we learn that Jaqueline has a member of Hai’s gang on her side. However, the next mission—kill Hai himself—is not so successful. And in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, Bi begins to question the purity of Jaqueline’s motives.

Similar to the first Furie, the plot of Furies revolves around women in the dregs of society rising against the underworld that profits the exploitation of women and children. In the first film, it was child kidnapping and organ harvesting. In this film, the focus is on prostitution and trafficking women (especially adolescent girls). This makes the villains far more loathsome than if they were your average drug dealers and extortionists. That said, it is interesting that someone as awful as Phạm Thị Châu Thanh would be given such a tragic backstory. There is a touching scene after she murders her first gang member that she’s desperately trying to wash the blood off her hands. She explains to her surrogate sister Thanh that she enjoyed killing the S.O.B., but fears becoming consumed by the feeling. By the end, she has become so hardened by killing, loss, and betrayal that she ultimately allows herself to be consumed “by the darkness” that was inside of her. And thus is born one of the most horrific villainesses of recent action cinema.

The acting for the most part is good around the board. Dong Anh Quynh makes a good impression as the brooding Bi. She is a young woman who was dealt a losing hand, lost, started to hoist herself up from the bottom of the well, and then had that snatched from her. Complimenting her is the more optimistic Hong and Thanh. Thanh, as played by Toc Tien, is initially suspicious (and outright dismissive) of Bi, but warms to her as she sees much of herself in the newbie. Their relationship becomes the crux upon which the more emotional moments of the climax are set. Veronica Ngo pushes herself to the sidelines as the mentor character for the leads, but still gets to show the full range of emotions from vulnerable (she has been wronged by Hai in the past) to completely ruthless.

Speaking of ruthlessness, there is a fair amount of violent action here, choreographed once again by Kefi Abrikh and Yannick Ben. The training of Hai Phuong’s character in the first Furie was glossed over in flashbacks, but takes center stage in the second act. The girls spar, practice with punching bags, and even train in close quarters knife fighting. The first big set piece has the three girls storming a hideout for kidnapped girls and fighting a bunch of gang members there. That is trumped by the next one, which has the girls fighting a bunch of blade-wielding goons in a narrow hallway at a nightclub. There’s some nice choreography here and all three actresses make a strong showing for themselves. Unfortunately, that is followed by a motorcycle chase involving guys on motorcycles wielding machetes, a la John Wick Chapter 3. That scene is ruined by an excess of dodgy CGI, including what appears to be some “CGI people performing techniques of questionable physics” that we saw in films like Spider-Man (2002).

The action does right itself, fortunately, at the big climax. It starts with an awesome gun-fu sequence that does remind one of the better moments of John Wick, with the women fighting with their fists, feet, joint locks, throws and gunplay. That leads to a fight with different goons as they make their way closer to the main villain. At one point, Bi finds herself in a fight with a drug-addled junkie armed with a syringe in a fight that recalls the Donnie Yen/Wu Jing knife fight in SPL. There is some neat choreography as Bi uses all sorts of blocks, defenses and joint locks to keep her opponent from jabbing her with God-Knows-what.

Veronica Ngo stays out of the action spotlight until the finale, where she steps up. Her opponent fights with a more brutal and intense fighting style. Ngo, the “master” of this film, has a more laid back style that shows a greater economy of movement. She doesn’t throw her entire body into the fight initially because it’s not necessary: she can either step aside or defend herself with simple techniques. It’s only as the fight becomes more pitched that her movements become more vigorous. It also features a one-on-one martial arts/gunplay exchange that is cleverly choreographed and great to watch.

As a director, Ngo shows a lot of promise. However, she needed to tighten the film up a bit more. A lot of the dramatic moments that occur during the fights are too drawn out, affecting the pace of the both the action sequence and the film as a whole. She also loses points for the ambitious, but unconvincing, motorcycle sequence. But she does wring good performances out of the cast around a theme that is unsavory and uncomfortable, but needs to be addressed in one way or another. But if she were to direct another action film, I would certainly be interested in watching it.

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.