The Furious, the best action movie of the year, gets surprise early streaming release

That near-perfect 98% Rotten Tomatoes score is to be believed

The best action movies leave viewers not in shock but in awe. It usually happens in one key moment, a set piece that clearly cost more than any other scene. You sit there, flummoxed. How the hell did they pull that off? The hallway scene from Oldboy is a famous one. The helicopter-train fight from Extraction 2 is pretty dang close. Any sequence involving Iko Uwais’ fists fits the bill.

This year’s immediate entry into the pantheon didn’t just leave my mouth agape for a scene or two. It disconnected my jaw from my face within the first minute and left it on the floor for an additional hour and 52 minutes. And it’s now available to watch at home. (The movie, not my jaw.)

Here's why The Furious is legit

The Furious, directed by renowned fight choreographer Kenji Tanigaki and released in U.S. theaters on June 12, just got its streaming release Tuesday. For a moment, The Furious was the highest-rated movie of the year, sporting a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. (It’s currently at 98% based on 141 reviews.) The fight choreography has been called “balletic,” “chaotic,” and “a veritable gift from the genre gods.” Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz said it was like “Looney Tunes in a slaughterhouse.” For Variety, reviewer Guy Lodge called it a “flamboyantly violent and brashly enjoyable affair.” Peter Travers loved it. Now, I’d like to officially enter Polygon’s opinion of The Furious into public record: !!!!!!!!!

Once more with feeling: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Put simply, The Furious scores five out of five OMFGs. It is, dare I say, the best action movie of 2026 and maybe the past 50 years. (I weigh pre-’70s action movies on a different scale.) It’s a nonstop, ceaseless barrage of the most inventive, visceral, mind-bending action sequences that have ever been put to screen. Every punch feels like it’s going to shatter the space-time continuum. Every kick lands with the force of a thousand binary stars. Every elbow to the temple seems on the verge of opening an interdimensional vortex. There’s enough kinetic energy in The Furious to launch a fleet of rockets to the Andromeda Galaxy — and beyond.

The Furious pairs together the most compelling action movie inciting event (“guy’s wife gets kidnapped, he punches everyone he finds her”) with the second-most compelling action movie inciting event (“guy’s daughter gets kidnapped, he punches everyone until he finds her”). The smartest creative decision made in The Furious is that states its plot clearly and then shuffles it aside to let the action shine.

Joe Taslim, a few years off his generational turn in Cinemax’s sadly canceled Warrior, plays Navin, a journalist who’s searching for his wife, Matia (Jeeja Yanin), a fellow journalist who also happens to be well-trained in the art of kicking ass. Matia was investigating a string of child kidnappings when she went missing; Navin picks up where she left off in the hopes of finding her. Xie Miao (The Thousand Faces of Dunjia) plays Wang Wei, a handyman and single parent whose young daughter happens to get kidnapped. Wei is mute, which serves as a perfectly valid justification for letting him talk with his fists.

Also? Indonesian action legend Yayan Ruhian is in this thing sporting a bow and arrow. (For those unfamiliar: The presence of Ruhian, who was famously so good in The Raid that director Gareth Evans cast him as an entirely different character for the sequel because he “won’t do a martial arts film without Yayan being in it,” is just about the single biggest stamp of quality a martial arts film can have.)

How Tanigaki builds and builds and builds up the action

The Furious has fielded some criticism about its plot — that it’s too formulaic, too predictable, too flat. Members of the police force, for instance, are revealed as variously inept or corrupt. (If you’re familiar with martial arts flicks, that development happens roughly 10 out of 10 times.) The motivations of its leads are, admittedly, pretty straightforward. Supporting characters have about as much dimensionality as a nameless Final Fantasy NPC. Its dialogue — which mixes four languages with some sporadic but seriously shoddy English dubbing — has also been panned.

To all that I say: Who freakin’ cares!!! Xie speaks with his roundhouse kicks and Taslim chews up his storyline through revenge-gnashing teeth. Then the action kicks into high gear: When you’re watching a guy stand in the center of an underground nightclub’s MMA octagon and wield a hammer to build a tower out of the knocked-out corpses of about 20 other dudes, characterization is, frankly, the last thing anyone should be concerned about. By the way, that scene, which was teased in the film’s trailer, was positioned in pre-release marketing as the tent pole sequence. No other movie has quite pulled off anything like it; it debatably does not crack the five most thrilling fight sequences in the film.

One scene sees a guy sprinting alongside a speeding truck and kicking the crap out of its drivers — while wearing flip-flops. Another scene in an industrial freezer facility plays out like a realistic Mortal Kombat match. At one point, two characters have a “sword fight” with bicycles. There’s even a rare 1v1v2 fight.

The Furious culminates in a final boss battle that is so wild, so astonishing in the ways it lets bodies move, so relentless in what it puts the cast through, that I’m still reeling, weeks after seeing it in theaters for the first time. How? I keep asking myself. How the hell did they pull this off? I’ll never know because I’ll stick to rewatching what Tanigaki pulled off over and over again for the next 50 years.