Mad Max: Fury Road
After our previous week’s venture into summer action, I was not that enthused about another film of that sort, but the stars were aligned right, so we saw the new Mad Max movie. Going way back, I recall that The Road Warrior was the first movie I recall that mastered the sort of hyperkinetic, FX heavy action that is the standard fare of summer blockbusters, so this was sort of a trip down memory lane. It’s the same post-nuke, ruined world in which Australia is a savage desert, populated by warped maniacs, always on the prowl for gasoline to power their war-wagons. Max (Tom Hardy) is still the burned out, monosyllabic maverick, loyal only to himself, but once again he finds himself dragged into taking sides. In this episode Max finds himself on the side of a group of women (breeders as they are called), “stolen” from a self-inflated (literally) bully-dictator, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Burne). Joe is the ruler of a colony of warped (mutant?) sycophants who nearly worship him, in return for brief gushes of water doled out from a subterranean well. Meanwhile Max has been captured and is being used as an involuntary blood donor for a sick “War Boy” (Nicolas Hoult), mounted on the front of his vehicle like a trophy.
In yet another “meanwhile”, Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has liberated a group of breeders and is setting off in an armored vehicle in order to reach a green space that might be out there somewhere in the desert. Not surprisingly, the chase ensues, with Joe marshalling all of his forces to retrieve his breeders. Max is attached to the one of the vehicles as a blood supply and is an unwilling part of Joe’s War Boy army. When Max gets loose, he links up with the women and helps them in their quest for escape. Most of the movie, like other Max movies, is an extended chase scene, full of dust, violence, exploding gasoline, flying trucks and growling, hyper-testosteroned warriors dying like flies in order to get Joe’s breeders back to him. Max and his new crew are having nothing of that. They meet up with a group of older women and one disillusioned War Boy and become a new crew, off to some different end rather than being with Joe and his heavy-metal war boys.
If all this sounds completely over-the-top…it is, but you have to ask yourself, just WHAT are you doing in a Mad Max movie if you don’t want it to be over-the-top. In a summer that will probably see more frantic action movies, I doubt that any of them will beat this. It is violence, explosions and carnage, pretty much from beginning to end. It never lets up for more than a moment. As for acting, it’s pretty much all physical, very few sentences exceed 4 words and most consist of grunts, shrieks, roars and growls. There’s not much verbal content here.
The other question…does it work? I have to give it a rousing yes. George Miller directs, as he did back at the beginning (Road Warrior was also Mel Gibson’s introduction to American audiences) and he really nails it in this one. There’s very little plot to speak of, little exposition, mainly just a setup to a wild ride. Miller is one strange director with a Jekyl-Hyde record. Having a fairly small number of movies to his credit (15), most of what he has done is either hyper-violent, or something like Babe and Happy Feet….a bi-polar director and writer. Most of the movie seems to have relied on carefully staged stunts and non-digital FX, without an over-reliance on a huge staff of animators (like The Avengers?). I’m amazed that half of the cast wasn’t killed doing these stunts, but most of them are still breathing. The actors are as good as they need to be, but this really is not an actor’s movie. I did like (as I almost always do), Tom Hardy as Max. He’s great in these sort of physical movies and manages to convey a lot with a scowl and a grunt.
I liked this a lot more than I expected. It’s been 36 years since the first Mad Max movie. It was so Australian that when I saw it a few years later (after the US release of Road Warrior), that it needed subtitles. I didn’t think the Max franchise would still work but it did. I did not see the movie in 3D, so I can’t comment on whether that worked, but the visuals in the 2D version were excellent. The acrobatic action is hard to believe. If you are going to see one action movie this week, this would be my choice. I liked it much better than Avengers (a middling yawner IMO). This is a movie that makes extreme violence work. Be sure to take your heart meds before you go and strap yourself in for a completely insane chase, right up to the end.
