FURY

Every now and then, I like to see a movie that is comprised of nothing but lengthy scenes of ass kicking and taking names….That is someone, usually an avenging figure of some sort, going to town on evildoers and their assorted henchmen.

The Thai film FURY which I saw last night, although it has a bit of a slow start, more than satisfied my current appetite for this type of movie….It was a huge hit in Asia a couple of years back and I can see why….It’s a fantastic action film.

The story set-up is superfluous you only need to know a gangster’s girlfriend leaves him for another man which causes violence and more violence….This in turn leads her new beau (who is Japanese) to go back to Japan….The gangster moll discovers she is pregnant with his child which leads to one of the most unexpected, unlikely, and peculiar action heroes I have seen ever in a movie.

The daughter she gives birth to is autistic and rarely speaks, counts and sorts M&M’s by color, screams and shouts at the sight of flies, and is used in street performance by her adopted brother…. This consists of people throwing things at her head from apples to knives and her amazing ability to catch these objects.

Because you see Ah Sen, as she is called, is an autistic person who is very talented in one area like people who can play the piano really well or do complicated equations but can’t do the most basic human tasks such as feeding themselves or tying their shoes….The area she is talented in due to a kickboxing school next door which she used to watch for hours and her own practicing as well playing video games and watching martial arts movies is asskicking.

When her mother develops cancer and needs money for treatment, Ah Sen and her brother attempt to collect debts still owed her from when she was in the underworld….This leads to scenes of larger and larger groups of men being beaten to a pulp by 12 year old Ah Sen….This in turn brings in the sinister attentions of the original gangster who liked her mother and also Ah Sen’s father who comes back to help protect her.

Particularly impressive is the end sequence which seems to last for a long time wherein Ah Sen first clears a room of opponents than fights another retarded person whom she beats by mimicking then fights a series of opponents while scaling the side of a building and jumping back and forth between that and nearby elevated train tracks.

All in all, a very enjoyable action film that I imagine will be popular for years to come and that is not very nasty or bloody although the English subtitles on the version I saw were rubbish….They seemed to be just random words someone had thought of….I knew what was going on so finally ended up turning them off.