‘Furie’ is a Vietnamese action film from 2019 starring Veronica Ngo, and directed by Le-Van Kiet. Will it be ‘The Raid’ for Vietnam in terms of cross-cultural impact?
Furie is a Vietnamese action film, and was actually the first Vietnamese made film to be released in the United States. When I first heard about Furie, I wondered if it would serve as “The Raid” for Vietnam. The Raid was a badass action film that can be single-handedly credited with opening up the Indonesian film scene to the rest of the world.
If you’ve been following action films closely in recent years, you will have noticed a number of Eastern countries all searching for their ‘The Raid’. Just look to ‘Buybust’ from the Philippines for another example. A solid action flick can be exactly what a country needs to put its film industry on the cinematic map. Action crosses borders and leaves an impression regardless of any language or cultural barriers, it’s as simple as that.
So is Furie Vietnam’s ‘The Raid’? Well that’s without a doubt the intention. The real question is, does Furie succeed in that goal? Time will tell, but my guess is… maybe. It’s not as sure-fire an answer as Ong Bak or The Raid, it’s not as jaw-dropping, game-changing, or wildly different, but there’s plenty of merit to it.
PLOT
The plot of Furie follows Veronica Ngo as a former gangster, current debt collector who’s trying her raise her daughter as a single parent. Her daughter is kidnapped by shady people from her past and the rest of the film is a mad dash to recover her safely. The plot is quite similar to ‘Taken‘.
The clear highlight is Veronica Ngo in the lead role. She is fantastic and hopefully helms many more action films moving forward. She’s good in the fights, but is most impressive in the dramatic beats in between. The plot is as stock as you might expect from such a simple action premise, but the lead performance greatly elevates the material. She imbues every dramatic exchange with so much more vulnerability and feeling than most action stars ever attempt. There’s one big crying scene, not exactly unlike Stallone’s big crying scene at the end of ‘First Blood’, and Veronica Ngo absolutely knocks it out of the park. She adds serious emotional depth to what would otherwise be a pretty shallow character.
The daughter character is also well performed, always good to see a strong performance from a young actor. None of the other actors go beyond being just fine, there’s a cop character with a pretty significant role, and while his performance wasn’t bad, it did leave a lot to be desired.
ACTION
Getting into the action itself now, it’s good, but not great, except for a couple of short sequences toward the end that do rise to the higher level that I hoped for the rest of the film. The final one-on-one confrontation is great and effectively cathartic. There’s only one short bit of gunplay at the very end, but it had me wishing for more because it was excellently handled… aside from the sound effects which I’ll talk more about momentarily. There are a handful of badass moments that help redeem some of the lesser action.
The fights involve some brutal elements at times, cleavers slamming down on hands, sawblades pressing into throats, but the film feels afraid to fully commit to the violence. There’s hardly any blood, even when a fight involves giant knives and people getting slashed up. I felt like I was watched a censored for TV version, and on IMDb the film is actually listed with a TV-14 rating.
I did a little research into the film censorship board in Vietnam since I figured that was probably responsible.
What I found is that many Vietnamese producers live in fear of the censorship boards. Their regulations are described as general and vague, and the power they have is nearly absolute. I found an article on a Vietnamese made film called Cho Lon’s gangsters, and that film was pulled from screenings and threatened with a permanent ban unless significant cuts were made. The censorship board was quoted saying this: the film “contains elements of violence, which does not reflect the social reality of Vietnam, so the film cannot be popularized.”
There’s a fight early on where our protagonist gets stabbed in the shoulder, and I would’ve liked to have seen that factor into her fighting moving forward, you know, show her pain associated with that wound, maybe she has less mobility with that arm, or an enemy uses it to get an advantage over her, this is something that ‘Raid’ films and movies like ‘John Wick’ do very well.
I would’ve liked ‘Furie’ to at least show the toll a stab-wound takes on her body, see it weighing on her, but no, it doesn’t seem to have any impact on her at all, even though the untreated stab wound is showing through her shirt for the rest of the film. She even gets treated in a hospital at one point for other injuries, and apparently they didn’t think to treat her stab wound while she was there, they didn’t even put a band-aid over it or anything. It would be kind of funny if she ended up saving the day, and then just died of an infection like a month later because she never got that stab wound patched up.
Then there’s a point where she ends up getting shot toward the end of the film, and my little problem with this… is that the spot she gets shot in is right above this prominently placed shoulder stab wound that seems to have no impact at all on her. It’s like the same size wound with the same miniscule amount of blood, just an inch or two higher, even farther away from her vitals, still in the shoulder meat that every protagonist who has to take a bullet gets shot in, it’s odd to see such similar wounds treated so differently by the movie’s reality. One is a grave, life-threatening injury, and the other is treated like she got hit by a pebble.
WEAKNESSES
The film has two major weaknesses and they are pretty substantial areas, the sound design and the editing. Neither are horrendous, but they are pretty bad overall.
The sound design is weak. The film is far too reliant on stock sounds effects. The punches and kicks sound fine for the most part but when something breaks, or a car goes by honking, or especially when a door opens, it’s a stock sound you’ve certainly heard dozens of times before in cheap productions. The problem with these sounds isn’t just that they’re overused, it’s that they’re bad sounds to begin with. They literally use the shattering pottery joke-sound from ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ in the middle of an action scene, it fully took me out of the moment. And the absolute worst is the squeaky door sound.
That sound’s not appropriate for anything other than an old hatch on a submarine flinging open, but this movie uses it for any door opening, any piece of metal moving, really. They seriously used it over and over and over again.
The sound effects in the brief gunplay moment are also stock gunshot sounds that aren’t very good. Better sound design overall would bring this film up a level.
The other weak area is the editing. Now, the editing isn’t all bad, it’s more of a mixed bag. There are a couple of moments in the choreography that were cut just a bit faster than I would’ve preferred, but it’s nowhere near ‘Taken 3’ or ‘Alex Cross’ levels. For the most part, the fights were well-cut.
My problems with the editing were largely contained to the non-action sequences. There are quite a few weird or awkward moments where things just feel off, purely because the editing wasn’t as tight as it needed to be. The film has some flashbacks, some of which are necessary, but a number of them aren’t. There’s a moment in an early action sequence where everything pauses and we’re shown a shot of what just appears to be an empty forest. Then we get a reaction shot from the protagonist who looks down pensively, then it cuts to what I was convinced was another flashback with a bunch of people in a restaurant/bar place, but then our protagonist busts through the wall and the action sequence starts up again.
It’s a weirdly played moment that could easily be fixed through editing, and this type of slowdown in the middle of an action sequence happens a couple of times throughout the film and always hurts the flow of the action when it pops up.
POSITIVES
To end on a positive note, the visual style of Furie is one of its greatest strengths. The color palette especially is remarkable. The colors feel perhaps a little ‘John Wick’ inspired, but really cranked up to 11. Furie is an extremely colorful film, with heavily saturated hues, not just in the lighting, but also in the wardrobe and set decoration. It looks like the movie takes place inside of a neon sign. It’s pretty damn cool.
Furie is a pretty good action flick that I do think has a good chance of bringing in a new audience to the Vietnamese film scene. If nothing else, I hope it leads Veronica Ngo to more badass starring roles.
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