Review: Get knocked out by the innovative fighting style of 'The Furious,' the future of action cinema

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The action scenes in Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious” are like nothing else in the multiplex.Imagine combat choreographed by ants, swarms of elbows and legs scrabbling to emerge victorious.

Churning piles of knees that hook and trip.A man swinging a ball-peen hammer at an incoming horde of baddies, knocking each unconscious as he scales their heaped bodies like a cheerleading pyramid.Meet the next Asian film fighting style that will clobber Hollywood slap-happy just as Hong Kong wire-fu spawned “The Matrix” and Indonesia’s “The Raid” begot “John Wick.” In five years, Keanu Reaves will be brawling like this.

(Although after decades of popularizing advancements in fisticuffs, he’s earned the right to relax.)The brawls are the sole reason to watch “The Furious.” Story-wise, it’s rote: A father (Xie Miao) must rescue his kidnapped little girl (Yang Enyou).Smack the four credited screenwriters with a rubber mallet if you’ve heard that one before.

The only narrative novelty is how audaciously cruel the movie is to kids.Tykes get slapped around, shot with arrows and dangled in traffic — tortures that are played seriously, but the shock of them allows you to guffaw.To be fair, abducted 9-year-old Rainy is pretty cute, with solemn eyebrows and a conscience that continually puts her in peril.

Thrust into a dungeon of other tots, she even punches a hobbled boy who deserves it.Movies If you want big popcorn fare from the best directors in the blockbuster game (Spielberg, Nolan, Ridley Scott), it’s here, along with a number of promising indie swings.Our setting is “somewhere in Southeast Asia,” according to the intro text.

I suppose no country wants blame for a child trafficker (Joey Iwanaga) who commands his minions to snatch fresh minors as casually as ordering takeout.Or perhaps the vagueness stems from casting a mish-mash of Thai, Indonesian, Vietn...