By Dean C. | Film critic and iGaming columnist, 11 years covering Asian cinema and digital entertainment. Published July 2026.
There’s a moment in The Raid You know the one. Where Iko Uwais enters a hallway and the film simply stops apologising for itself. No setup. No lingering reaction shot. The Silat starts, and it doesn’t stop until someone is face-down on concrete. Gareth Evans made a career-defining choice with that film: he decided that the audience’s time was sacred. Every second that didn’t deliver forward momentum was a second stolen from the viewer. That philosophy. Ruthless, unapologetic, almost aggressive in its efficiency. Is what separates genuinely great action cinema from the stuff that pads its runtime and calls it character development.
The Furious, Kenji Tanigaki’s pan-Asian ensemble that opened worldwide in June 2026 to the kind of buzz City on Fire readers will recognise from pre-release Busan coverage, carries the same DNA. Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian, Jeeja Yanin. The cast alone reads like a greatest-hits compilation. But what Tanigaki understood, and what makes the film work, is that the assembly of talent only lands if the pacing honours it. Dead time is the enemy. Filler is disrespectful.
So let’s talk about what that means, because I think it’s more interesting than a simple film review.
The Design Philosophy Nobody Names
Gareth Evans has spoken in interviews about his editing approach on The Raid 2 A film that Rolling Stone described as redefining action cinema through the deliberate elimination of artifice. Evans cuts to the consequence. He doesn’t linger on the anticipation; he delivers the moment and moves. The average shot length in the corridor sequence of the original Raidis under two seconds. That’s not accident. That’s architecture.
Tanigaki works differently. His ensemble structure in The Furiousdemands more connective tissue between fighters, more time establishing who each body belongs to before it gets put in danger. But the underlying commitment is identical. Every scene earns its runtime or it gets cut. Yayan Ruhian’s introduction in the film takes roughly forty seconds of screen time before he’s in conflict. That’s the budget. Spend it, then move.
This is a design philosophy, not just an aesthetic preference. And it maps, almost one-to-one, onto something completely outside cinema.
Speed as a Promise
Think about what you’re actually doing when you sit down to watch a film like The Raid You’re entering into a contract. The filmmaker promises: I will not waste your attention. In exchange, you give them ninety-nine minutes. The moment Evans breaks that contract. The moment a scene runs twenty seconds longer than it should. You feel it. The spell breaks. You’re suddenly aware you’re sitting in a chair watching a screen.
The best action choreographers in Indonesian and Hong Kong cinema have always understood this intuitively. Jackie Chan’s work in the 1990s was built on the same principle. Chan has described the construction of his stunt sequences as ‘removing the pauses’. Every beat of physical comedy or danger had to connect directly to the next without a breath the audience didn’t earn. He called filler ‘borrowed time you can’t pay back.’
That instinct. That the promise of speed is also a moral commitment to the viewer. Shows up in contexts far beyond the cinema screen. It’s the same logic that drives great restaurant service, same-day delivery, and, increasingly, online gaming.
The Gaming Parallel No One Wants to Talk About Honestly
Australian online gaming has had a speed problem for years. Pokies players who land a withdrawal know the feeling: you’ve hit, the balance is there, and then you wait. Sometimes hours. Sometimes until Monday, because the platform’s payments team apparently doesn’t work weekends. It’s the action cinema equivalent of a thirty-second reaction shot after a punch lands. Momentum-killing. Trust-destroying.
The platforms that figured this out. The ones that built their infrastructure around eliminating that gap. Are pulling players who previously wouldn’t have bothered with online gaming at all. Those players are looking for fast payout pokies Australia for the same reason action cinema audiences rewarded Evans and Tanigaki: because the promise of speed is the product, not a bonus feature. A withdrawal that clears in under an hour isn’t a luxury. It’s the baseline. Everything slower than that is borrowed time you can’t pay back.
This matters because the psychology behind it is identical. A 2024 industry analysis from CMSWire on the state of digital customer experience found that consumers now rank immediacy above almost every other quality metric in digital transactions. They don’t want to feel like they’re waiting for a bank wire in 2009. They want the balance to move the way a Silat combination lands: clean, committed, no hesitation.
What The Furious Gets Right That Most Ensemble Films Don’t
Back to cinema, because the Furiousangle deserves more than a mention.
Ensemble action films usually fail in one of two ways. Either they shortchange half the cast. Give Joe Taslim thirty seconds of screen time while the A-lister gets the full third act. Or they try to give everyone equal footage and the structure collapses under its own weight. The Expendablesfranchise is the cautionary tale. Great cast. Wasted.
Tanigaki solved this by treating each fighter’s set piece as a self-contained short film. Jeeja Yanin’s sequence doesn’t bleed into Yayan Ruhian’s. They’re adjacent, not merged. The transitions between fighters are cuts, not dissolves. The film understands that its audience came to see eachof these performers do what they uniquely do, and giving them that without padding is the entire job.
City on Fire readers who follow the Indonesian action cinema coverage here will recognise this structure from Headshotand The Night Comes for Us Both films that used similar modular architecture to let their ensemble breathe without the runtime inflating. Tanigaki studied that playbook. He improved on it.
What he didn’t do is try to turn a martial arts ensemble into a character drama. That’s the move that kills these films. Audiences who buy a ticket for Xie Miao and Yayan Ruhian fighting do not need forty minutes of backstory. They need ten minutes of context and then the sequence. Trust the audience. Deliver the thing.
The Raid 3 and What’s at Stake
With The Raid 3confirmed in production. Stanley Tong at the helm, Iko Uwais returning, iQIYI holding rights. The question the City on Fire community keeps circling is whether the franchise can sustain the zero-dead-time standard in a third chapter. Tong is a legitimate choice. His work on Police Story 3: Supercopand Rumble in the Bronxproves he can maintain kinetic momentum across a feature-length runtime without sacrificing coherence.
But the Evans template is hard to replicate precisely because it isn’t just choreography. It’s editorial philosophy. It’s the choice, made in the cutting room, to remove every second that doesn’t earn its place. Tong’s visual style is slightly more expansive than Evans’. He likes a wider frame, more environmental storytelling. Whether that translates into dead time or richer context depends entirely on execution.
I’m cautiously optimistic. The franchise’s DNA is too strong, and Uwais is too professional, to let the pacing slide. But the proof will be in the first corridor.
FAQ
What makes The Raid’s action choreography different from other martial arts films? The Raid uses Pencak Silat. Indonesian martial arts. Rather than the Hong Kong wirework or Chinese wushu more common in Asian action cinema. Gareth Evans and choreographer Iko Uwais built the sequences around real Silat techniques, then edited at an average shot length under two seconds. The result feels genuinely dangerous rather than theatrical.
Is The Furious connected to the Fast and Furious franchise? No. The Furious(2026) is a separate pan-Asian martial arts ensemble film directed by Kenji Tanigaki, starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian, and Jeeja Yanin. The title similarity is coincidental. Tanigaki is probably best known outside Japan for his action choreography work and his upcoming collaboration with Peter Dinklage on The Reckoner
What is ‘zero dead time’ in action cinema? It’s an editorial philosophy, not an official term. The idea is that every second of screen time should either advance tension, deliver action, or establish something the audience needs for the next sequence. Any moment that doesn’t do one of those three things is dead time. Footage that slows momentum and breaks the contract between filmmaker and audience.
Will The Raid 3 follow the same style as the original films? Stanley Tong is directing, which signals a slightly different visual approach than Gareth Evans’ films. Tong tends toward wider frames and more environmental action than Evans’ tight corridor choreography. Whether that changes the pace significantly remains to be seen. Iko Uwais’ involvement as star suggests the physical language will stay grounded in Silat.
Where does The Furious fit in the history of pan-Asian ensemble martial arts films? It’s the most ambitious entry since SPL 2: A Time for Consequences(2015) in terms of cross-nationality casting. Tanigaki assembled talent from China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Japan, which is logistically complicated and creatively rare. Early reception suggests he pulled it off. City on Fire’s full film review archive has context on the broader genre history if you want to place it properly.
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The Takeaway
Great action cinema and great digital products share an uncomfortable truth: the audience knows immediately when you’ve wasted their time. Evans knew it. Tanigaki knows it. The best online gaming platforms are learning it. The zero-dead-time philosophy isn’t a style choice. It’s a commitment to the person on the other side of the screen. Break it, and they don’t come back.
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