Max, looking younger than last time we saw him (Tom Hardy taking over for Mel Gibson), is taken captive by a flamboyant cult, lead by the unimpressive named Joe and filled with worshiping, sickly, pale, “war boys.” Coincidently, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) chooses this time to betray the evil leader and sneak away his wives in an armored fuel truck. Fanatic war boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult) takes off in pursuit, bringing Max as a source of transfusions. Max can’t stay a prisoner for long, and once free, teams up with Furiosa to fight off the cult’s diseased warriors and souped-up vehicles in a two-hour road chase.
Writer/Director George Miller returns to the series that made his career, and sticks exclamation points everywhere. Fury Road is bigger, louder, faster, more violent (if less gritty), and more beautiful than Mad Max has been before. This is The Road Warrior, turned up to 11, and then turned up some more. It is an epic, telling a mythic tale in a mythic fashion. And except for a few moments of stylized emoting (Furiosa dropping to her knees to cry out her misery), it is non-stop action. The story feels like it is ten thousand years old (and it might be) and everything is so grand that it left me thinking this should be a story of ancient gods, not mortals.
Sound pretty good? Well…it is…pretty good. But it’s not great. Two hours at 11 is a long time, and that epic story telling starts looking like a pile of clichés pretty quickly. That’s the thing about myth—we’ve seen it all before and it seems silly if examined too closely.
Fury Road is a film that suffers from its overstated reviews. It quickly gained a reputation as the best science fiction movie of recent years (it’s not), and certainly of this year (it’s not). As action done perfectly (nope). And, as meaningful feminist filmmaking (not at all). It’s a fun film, but lowering expectations is in order.
The non-stop action gets tiring, particularly as these scenes have been done before by Miller himself. It is a retread of the last third of The Road Warrior. When Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome came out, it was attacked by critics and the public for its climax being a repeat of the chase from the previous film. It is hard for me to figure why Fury Road is getting a pass on that when the entire film is a repeat. Perhaps the first three films are old enough that current audiences haven’t seen them—if so, that’s quite sad. The car chase, with its accompanying gun fire, circus acts, flaming electric guitar (yup, there’s one of those), giant drums, and constant explosions is done very well. Except for film speed changes (which was all the rage in 1926), I couldn’t ask for better. I could ask for some time between combats so that I could get to know the characters and what is at stake when generic evil dude pops up with a chinsaw. The villains were just Bad Guy #1, Bad Guy #2, Bad Guy #3. It’s pretty, but empty.
Character development suffers even in the few moments of non-fighting. Max barely speaks. He gets some PTSD visions, and that’s all the personality he has. Feriosa is the tough chick. That’s it. The most clearly defined character is the dying war boy, and that’s only because he has more than one character trait. This is part and parcel with larger-than-life storytelling, along with the actors either playing for the back rows (the earlier mentioned knee dropping despair) or not acting at all (Hardy seems to be on substantial mood suppressants). But Star Wars managed it, with its thinly clothed icons having some personality.
There isn’t much plot, but what’s there is drivel. Coincidences and really, really bad plans are what we’ve got. The story is just an excuse for machines with wheels to run into other machines with wheels, so its weakness is only a minor detriment. The world itself makes no sense, which again, is part of the whole mythic thing, but films need a bit more foundation than epic poems, at least films shot semi-realistically. The world has lost absolutely everything, except for replacement fuel injectors and gasoline. The Road Warrior was unlikely in its depiction of a gas-low world where everyone was constantly using tons of petrol. Fury Road is just nuts. I’d have never guessed how abundant chrome would be in the new world.
Much has been made of Fury Road being a feminist masterpiece. This was primarily started by a men’s rights advocate (and he didn’t use the world “masterpiece”) writing a paranoid review from seeing the trailer. Apparently having a strong female character was too much to bare, and others picked up the line. But like most things coming from men’s rights groups, it is misguided. The biggest failing in that narrative is that this is a Mad Max movie. It shouldn’t be. It should be Furiosa of the Future, as she is the protagonist. We should have started with her, learned more about her, gotten into her head. Furiosa, a female bad-ass, steals evil Joe’s harem girls. The only male needed in that story was the war boy Nux. But no one trusts a female-lead action film, so we have Max. It’s Max we start with. It’s Max we follow. He is in every way unnecessary, but yet, there he is. In a movie that, from the story, should be all about women, the lead is an inserted male. Unless you consider The Last Samurai an Asian rights film, Fury Road is no feminist movie.
For those of us who have seen the earlier entries, continuity is an issue. When is Fury Road supposed to take place? Online speculators suggested that this was a new Max, but Miller said otherwise. Since he still has his car, that places it before The Road Warrior, but that doesn’t work on many fronts. And age is an issue. Max had a family before the fall of civilization, and a job as a cop, placing the apocalypse no more than twenty years ago. Furiosa, who seems about Max’s age (and played by an actress two years older) was either a small child or not yet born when the collapse happened. Huh. Perhaps Miller should have hired Gibson again. At least an old-man-Max would have made sense. And who is the little girl in Max’s PTSD visions? The death of his wife and child no longer bother him, but the loss of some unknown girl does.
Fury Road is a fun, mindless, explosion-filled extravaganza, that would be more fun with a few less explosions. It is silly, inconsistent, and as socially relevant as a Transformers movie. Ask for little, and don’t worry about getting up in the middle for popcorn, and you’ll probably have a good time.
I place it third of the four Mad Max films, after its two immediate predecessors.
It follows Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985).