MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

Mad Max: Fury Road

Grade: B+

Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, and Hugh-Keays Byrne as Immortan Joe; with Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee and Courtney Eaton as Immortan Joe’s Wives

Premise: In post-apocalyptic Australia, a widowed drifter tries to help a group of imprisoned women escape the clutches of a tyrannical cult leader.

Rated R for strong bloody violence and constant scenes of peril and destruction, brief nudity, and disturbing images

Once upon a time, a B-level Australian action movie called Mad Max (1979) and its 1981 sequel, The Road Warrior (1981), brought to the world’s attention one Mel Gibson. Gibson, of course, went on to become one of the most popular movie stars of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and a revolutionary/controversial director in the ‘00s. Though he left the Mad Max franchise after its 1985 installment, Beyond Thunderdome, there were always hopes of a fourth go-round from writer/director George Miller. While Gibson is no longer attached to the project (probably a good thing, given the socio-political baggage the star comes with), Mad Max: Fury Road has officially burst onto a Summer 2015 scene loaded with big-budget sequels and Marvel Comics adaptations to give us a dash of something a little, um, different.

I saw the first two movies long ago, and, while I wouldn’t say it’s necessary to have any previous knowledge of the series, I will say you need to be prepared for something Different. We’ve grown rather accustomed to post-apocalyptic landscapes in recent years, whether in teen/young adult fare (The Hunger Games, Divergent) or big-budget star vehicles (World War Z, Oblivion, After Earth), but Mad Max: Fury Road is something else altogether. Like its predecessors, Fury Road imagines a world that is very dark, very wicked, very zany, and very Australian. Its main villainous race looks like a mix of zombies and inhabitants of Indiana Jones’ Temple of Doom, its swashbuckling heroines have missing extremities, its tough-guy heroes barely talk, much of what dialogue anyone has is unintelligible, all its people worship oil and wheels, and one of the main villain’s sidekicks sports some prominent nipple rings. That isn’t all. I won’t spoil all the details, but, needless to say, Fury Road is truly different (not altogether a bad thing), but it is also very much A) a spectacle, and B) a pretty much literal thrill ride. If nothing else, I can guarantee you that if you see Mad Max: Fury Road, you will see things onscreen that you won’t see again this summer, and maybe ever again.

Plot

After a series of devastating ‘Oil Wars’, the landscape of Australia has been decimated, resulting in a barren wasteland in which oil and vehicles are king. In one nasty corner of the desert, a group of famished people (who aren’t above eating each other from time to time) are occasionally gifted food and water by a sickly, deformed tyrant, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Joe rules a cult of hairless, tattooed, branded warriors called the War Boys, who rule the land by capturing and killing or enslaving anyone they find, and stockpiling oil, food, and water. One day, an ex-cop still rattled by the loss of his wife and young daughter falls into their hands. His name is Max (Tom Hardy).

Imprisoned, painfully tattooed and branded, and forced to serve as a blood donor, Max ends up an unwitting passenger on a search-and-destroy mission when one of the War Boys’ prominent clan members, one-armed Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), goes rogue. It turns out she’s attempting to smuggle Immortan Joe’s’ five young wives/hostages to safety in the green, peaceful homeland of her childhood. This doesn’t sit well with Joe and his worshipful minions, who launch a fleet of tricked-out cars and trucks to hunt the Imperator down and return the young women she’s taken, one of whom is pregnant with an heir to Immortan’s power. However, all parties are waylaid by a giant storm, after which Max manages to join Imperator’s party on a big eighteen-wheeler. But there’s a stowaway, a young, glory-hound of a War Boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult). And in hot pursuit are Immortan Joe, his War Boy fleet/army, and his allies’ forces from nearby settlements. Badly outnumbered and dealing with limited fuel, power and ammo, the Imperator and Max try to get the women to the paradise the Imperator knows is her homeland.

What Works?

There is only one reason to see Mad Max: Fury Road—the action sequences. Even in a summer with The Avengers, upcoming Marvel projects like Ant Man and Fantastic Four and even Jurassic World, I feel confident saying you won’t see more action in a movie…probably this whole year. Fury Road is 120 minutes long, and I would guess about 90 of them chronicle high-speed, pell-mell, balls-to-the-wall action sequences (here is a movie that deserves to be called The Fast and the Furious). And what sequences they are. I can only imagine that special effects and green screens were used, but these high-speed scenes seem awfully real, and they’re magnificent. Action-hungry teens and young adults who are willing to embrace the absurd will have a ball with all the chases and all the vehicles in the chases. Old sports cars put on monster truck wheels? Check. Cars running on tank treads? Check. A huge truck set up with a whole wall of speakers to which a man is attached while perennially playing a huge steel guitar, even while the truck is speeding down the road? Check. Cars with flamethrowers and machine guns? Check.  

Indeed, this one of those rare movies where all the pieces are set up and the final action sequence really, truly delivers—I can’t imagine even a video-game-obsessed fanboy dreaming up a better-choreographed, more exciting whopper of a final chase than the one this movie delivers, which features two different parties of people pursuing each other and fighting—on about five different speeding vehicles—with guns, knives, spears, fists and grenades, while a fleet of backup vehicles zooms after them (with That Guy just wailing away on his guitar in the background). And that isn’t even the chase scene that takes place during the huge storm in the first act, in which the cars’ combatants must contend with lightning bolts, walls of windblown sand, and powerful gusts prone to flipping these vehicles into the air in showers of flaming parts and flailing bodies. There is also a brilliantly-staged fight scene that almost feels like a slapstick comedy setpiece, in which an at-odds Max and Imperator fight—with Max also fending off the dainty women she’s with, who occasionally try to assist her—all while he’s handcuffed to a semi-conscious Nux. Not all of this movie’s action needs to be going fast-lane fast to be entertaining.

It’s sometimes hard to remember (and hard to believe) that British actor Tom Hardy got his breakthrough as the talky motormouth in Inception, who just about stole the movie from charismatic actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Since then, he’s specialized in playing strong, silent types in movies like Warrior, Lawless, The Drop and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (sure, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises was a little chatty— “when Gotham is ashes, you have my permission to die!”—but he was defined by his physical bulk). Indeed, I had a bet going with a friend who estimated Hardy would say fewer than 100 words in the entirety of the movie, and, while neither of us counted, I think he won (so I owe him $5). Still, Hardy remains a formidable presence who is believable in the action scenes and has enough machismo that he draws the eye whether silent or otherwise. But with him so quiet and sullen, it’s Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult who really rule the show. Theron is buzz-cut, tanned and one-armed here, but she’s the heart of the movie, keeping the characters together and, it seems, alive, by sheer force of will. And Hoult, looking even freakier than he did as a slowly-thawing zombie in Warm Bodies, manages to bring life and personality to his stowaway who ends up having a huge part to play.

What Doesn’t Work?

There’s no denying Mad Max: Fury Road is weird—probably more than it needs to be—and some of it is jarringly so (I don’t think we needed to know that the War Boys drink mostly milk that is continuously pumped from the breasts of women in the colony). It’s also slightly infuriating at times that there is so little dialogue, and that a great portion of what dialogue there is cannot be understood amidst all the noise, action, and accents. And not to mention the characters’ names are things like Imperator, The People Eator, The Dag, Angharad, Rictus Erectus, Valkyrie, Toast, Cheedo, and Slit (with names like that—maybe this movie is intended for video-game-playing teens). It’s also true that, possibly because so much happens during the course of the movie, it seems closer to 2.5 hours than two.

Content

With its weirder touches (did I mention one of Immortan Joe’s sons is a disfigured midget? What about the guy who likes to fondle his own nipple rings?), and minimal dialogue, this movie isn’t for everyone. However, it is quite involving, and anyone who can embrace or overlook the inherent weirdness of some of the early chapters is in for a quite a ride (literally). While there isn’t much in the way of profanity (mainly because there’s not much in the way of dialogue), this movie is very intense, with the good guys in almost constant peril and people dying some yikes-inducing deaths. There are also a few hints of nudity.

Bottom Line

In the last month, I’ve seen Furious 7 and Avengers: Age of Ultron, and neither contained as much sheer action as Mad Max: Fury Road. Despite its minimal dialogue and dusty color palette, this movie is a true Spectacle, the very definition of a Thrill Ride. Give me an hour-and-a-half of groups of vehicles speeding across desert roads shooting and lobbing grenades and fireballs at each other—sometimes in the midst of a freaky electric storm—and a couple engaging, effective characters, and you’ve got this movie. It’s weird—its post-apocalyptic world makes The Hunger Games’ Panem look like the world of a mainstream TV sitcom—but there is some stuff in here, action-wise, you won’t see anywhere else. Tom Hardy’s good in his usual strong, silent guy role, Charlize Theron carries the movie with a heroic turn, and the stunning, realistic-looking, brilliantly-choreographed action will keep you watching. If nothing else, I can guarantee you that if you see Mad Max: Fury Road, you will see things onscreen that you won’t see again this summer, and maybe ever again.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Directed by George Miller

Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris

Rated R

Length: 120 minutes