Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Inside Furioza’ on Netflix, the So-so Sequel to a Polish Saga About Hooligans Diving Deep Into Organized Crime

By John Serba

Inside Furioza (now on Netflix) is the continuing story of Polish soccer hooligans who slippery-sloped their way into being full-on drugs-and-guns criminals. The saga began with director Cyprian T. Olencki’s 2021 film Furioza, which established two rival gangs and their involvement with a gangster organization in the port city of Gdynia, and apparently was enough of a streaming hit to warrant this bigger, longer sequel that comes dangerously close to hitting the three-hour mark. That might be our biggest sticking point with this wannabe-epic that reassembles key cast members for another gritty and authentic slab of melodrama gussied up with generous gobs of violence. 

INSIDE FURIOZA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Furioza gang consists of the “good” guys in the sense that they’re the morally suspect protagonists of this tale. The Antmen are the “bad” guys because they’re Furioza’s rivals, and they also run drugs. But what if Furioza wanted to get into that nasty business too? They’d have to do more than police the boardwalk by punishing lazy dog owners for not picking up the dookie, throwing a few choice fists at ’em and intimidating a man to the point where he barehands a glistening pile of the ol’ brown for deposit in the nearest bin. The focus of this film is its predecessor’s scene-stealer, Golden (Mateusz Damiecki), a loose cannon of a man who assumes leadership of the Furioza after his oldest buddy, Furioza founder Kaszub (Wojciech Zielinski), becomes the subject of a deeply weepy funeral monitored by the cops – steely eyed former Furioza sympathizer Dzika (Weronica Ksiazkiewicz) and cynical drunk Bauer (Lukasz Simlat) – and visited by the Antman himself, Mrowka (Szymon Bobrowski). Which is curious, since Mrowka sure seems like the guy who did Kaszub in. He had the signature pitchfork wounds and everything.

There’s a reason for that, but I’m going to dance around the very early first-act spoiler and only reveal that Golden often sees Kaszub’s ghost, possibly because our crazy-eyed guy tends to put a lot of cocaine into his nasal cavities, sometimes when it’s on a boring old table and sometimes when it’s on a not-at-all-boring woman’s naked chest. Golden tames himself a little as he courts an angelic dance instructor, Eli (Pola Gonciarz), and she allows him to steal her from her fiancee, even though she knows this guy’s probably trouble, especially considering his manner of “courtship” is closer to “harassment” than, say, just giving her his number. He’s so smitten, he wants to buy her the world – they have a “thing” and that “thing” involves him saying he’ll buy her the sea and Eli retorting that it can’t be purchased – and maybe that’s part of the reason he follows his greedlust down dark paths, setting up the Furioza as drug runners, thus deepening the rivalry with Mrowka and his cadre of burly toughs.

Both factions catch wind of potential lucrative business in Dublin, which prompts them to brawl on the Emerald Isle for a change of scenery. Mouthguards go in, pipes and machetes and pitchforks are wielded, some don’t make it off the island alive, but at least the key characters walk away with just some puncture wounds and things that would make regular folk get a bit of reconstructive surgery, or at least buy the lotion to make scar tissue shrink instead of wearing their wounds like badges of honor. There are large swaths of this movie that exist to set up action sequences (say, a shootout with Mrowka) and affirm that Golden is an impulsive f—up (interactions with his mother), and eventually we get to the part where he has an opportunity to score a big-piles-of-money deal with the Irish Republican Army, which, perhaps it goes without saying, is an organization far more powerful than a bunch of Polish dimbulbs who used to be really into soccer. The deal might even prompt Golden to (gulp) align with Mrowka for a while. Dogs and cats! Living together!

Photo: Netflix

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Ultras is a 2020 Netflick about Italian soccer hooligans who – get this – tend to fight a lot and get into extralegal quandaries. 

Performance Worth Watching: It’s hard not to admire Damiecki’s gonzo performance, as he stops a half-inch shy of bouncing off the walls as a gone-bananas guy who’s lost sight of – well, whatever he’s lost sight of. Which is a way of saying good performance, bad writing.

Memorable Dialogue: Golden states his philosophy, and therefore the movie’s thesis: “I’d rather live one year as a tiger than my whole life as a pussy!”

Sex and Skin: Scads of butts, boobs, female frontals and semi-graphic sex-having.

Our Take: Olencki maintains an uptempo pace for significant portions of Inside Furioza, mirroring the coke-addled jitter of his paranoid protagonist, who tends to follow his gut (and nose, and wang) and doesn’t seem to be much of a thinker. And it sort of works, although I can’t help but question if the director’s motive is to keep things moving moving moving in order to cram as much story into the movie as possible and keep it under a tight (cough) 180 minutes. But it never justifies its 167-minute run time. The most notable instance in which it slows its row is a grim sequence in which an Antman who’s had all his fingers smashed and mangled – which we see in great detail, so hooray for the makeup and FX teams I guess? – tries to dial his phone for help and ends up cursing out poor Siri in the process (although I’m willing to admit that she might deserve it). Olencki lingers on this guy’s misery, and I think it’s supposed to be funny in a manner that brings to mind Tarantino or Guy Ritchie, but just feels drawn out, a semi-desperate stab at being edgy.

The film hops from Golden to Mrowka to the cops (who aren’t much more than plot cogs given the occasional opportunity for a darkly comic flourish) and around and around, and these characters never progress beyond their core cliches. What motivates Golden? He wants to be rich, I guess. Why does Eli find herself drawn to this hyperactive goon? Cuz girls always are drawn to the bad boys. Does Mrowka have any kind of inner life? Nah. What about Bauer and Dzika? They probably had more to do in the first movie. It’s easy to admire Olencki’s eye for authentic, street-level storytelling, but his action sequences are rarely thrilling; the big brawl, which was a high point of Furioza, simply lacks the juice to give us an adrenaline boost, just like the love story fails to inspire any conflicted emotional feelings for a protagonist who never convinces us that he deserves anything good in his life. These are just boilerplate scenes in a film burdened by episodic plotting and very little in the way of dramatic tension or drive. This is Golden’s story, who’s plotting a course to self-destruction, I guess, not that we care all that much.

Our Call: Inside Furioza wants to roar like a tiger, but just meows like a – well, you know. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.