The Furious review – dial-shifting dadsploitation mayhem as father goes in search of kidnapped daughter

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There’s more than a whiff of Taken in Kenji Tanigaki’s exhilarating martial-arts movie, in which a handyman goes after some evil people traffickers It keeps happening: every few years, usually during a run of lethargic Hollywood spectacles, the Overton window of screen violence gets recalibrated by a muscular wonder from the east. Thundering along in the bloody footsteps of the Raid films and the Hindi punch-’em-up Kill, this martial-arts showcase from Japanese-born, Hong Kong-based director Kenji Tanigaki opens in generic dadsploitation territory. “Somewhere in Southeast Asia”, as a caption has it, mute Chinese handyman Wang Wei (Miao Xie) tears off after the traffickers who have nabbed his daughter (Enyou Yang). Having Hulk-smashed its way out of the Taken box, though, The Furious starts to crank it up. Boy, does it crank it up; the closing half-hour achieves a pummelling intensity unlikely to be matched by any other release this year. There are one or two plot developments. Cribbing...
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‘My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six’: Alan Alda on childhood, marriage and 60 years of stardom

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Best known as Hawkeye in the TV series M*A*S*H, the 89-year-old actor, director and writer has another hit on his hands with a revamp of his 1981 movie The Four Seasons. He talks about his Parkinson’s disease, Woody Allen – and what he really thinks of Donald Trump

Alan Alda never expected this. The 89-year-old is back topping the charts with an update of his film The Four Seasons. In 1981, Alda wrote, directed and starred in the movie about three inseparable couples who holiday together every quarter until divorce, envy and angst intervene.

Now the film has been turned into a TV series by Tina Fey, with Alda as a producer and, at the time of writing, it is the fourth most watched show on Netflix. “It’s really interesting to have my work appeal to a new generation of very smart writers,” he tells me on a video call from New York. What gave him even more pleasure was watching a screening of the original movie a couple of weeks ago. “The people were laughing at the same things they were 44 years ago. And just as heartily. It was so good to see that the point of view wasn’t outdated.”

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