Mad Max: Fury Road

Director: George Miller
Screenplay: George Miller and Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris
Stars: Tom Hardy (Max Rockatansky), Charlize Theron (Imperator Furiosa), Nicholas Hoult (Nux), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Immortan Joe), Josh Helman (Slit), Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus), Zoë Kravitz (Toast the Knowing), Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (The Splendid Angharad), Riley Keough (CapableAbbey Lee (The Dag), Courtney Eaton (Cheedo the Fragile), John Howard (The People Eater), Richard Carter (The Bullet Farmer), Iota (The Doof Warrior), Angus Sampson (The Organic Mechanic)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: Australia / U.S.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Mad Max: Fury RoadIt makes sense that Mad Max: Fury Road contains about three decades’ worth of hyperkinetic action packed into its breakneck two-hour running time. After all, a full 30 years have passed since the nomadic road warrior named Max, an iconic character originally created and previously played in three films by Mel Gibson, drove through the cinematic wasteland of postapocalyptic Australia, and one can only imagine that co-writer/director George Miller, who has helmed or co-helmed all four installments of the series and has been trying to get this one made for 12 years now, has spent that time accumulating energy. The result is Fury Road—122 minutes of release. It’s an all-out rush of visceral, kinetic power and—yes—fury that mixes the old and the new in ways that are both dazzling and exhausting.

Miller has said that he envisioned the film as one long chase sequence, which is the logical extension of a film series whose previous two installments climaxed with protracted desert chases in which Max and a small band of allies tried to outrun a menacing gang of anarchic weirdos hellbent on their destruction. Miller’s Mad Max 2, aka The Road Warrior (1981), is still the pinnacle of the series, as its lengthy chase sequence redefined the visual possibilities of one of cinema’s oldest forms while also maintaining an elegance and economy that remains virtually unmatched. In Fury Road, Miller doesn’t try to match when he accomplished there (and, in a slightly lesser form, at the end of 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), but instead tries to obliterate it from our memory by taking every aspect of the cinematic chase and ratcheting it up to the nth degree. The result is the action movie on overdrive—a wild, reckless film that works as pure form, even if it doesn’t quite delivery in terms of drama or character or politics, which is part of what elevated Miller’s previous Mad Max films above all the other postapocalytpic actioners that glutted theater and video stores throughout the Reagan era.

Given that it’s been three decades since Max went beyond Thunderdome, Miller and coscreenwriters Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris don’t waste any time and get right down to business. In the frenetic, raggedly edited opening 10 minutes, we follow Max (Tom Hardy) as he is chased down in the desert by a gang working for the bloated, skull-mask-wearing warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the villainous Toecutter in the original Mad Max); is captured, bound and gagged, and tattooed; manages to briefly escape and lead his bald, white-painted captors on a hectic chase before being captured again and strung up. Thus, contrary to expectations, the eponymous hero spends the first portion of the film in captivity, eventually encased in an iron mask and strapped to the front of a vehicle like a human hood ornament where he can only watch in abject terror as Joe and his devoted minions chase down Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who had been one of Joe’s best drivers but now turns against him by helping a half-dozen of his forced concubines escape his clutches. The title of the film may bear Max’s name, but Furiosa is really its hero(ine), as she is the driving force behind the narrative. That Max eventually joins forces with her is not new, as both The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome involved Max allying with a pre-existing group, not for his benefit, but for theirs. That has always been the stoic, often self-interested Max’s expression of human connection—begrudgingly helping others in the ancient reluctant hero mold—and Miller keeps that aspect of his character unchanged.

Unfortunately, if there is a real weakness to Fury Road, it the character of Max. On paper, the casting of Tom Hardy is a brilliant coup to replace Gibson, but it doesn’t quite work on screen. Part of the issue is the way Max is conceptualized this time around: More so than in the other films, he has lost his humanity, and Hardy plays his animalistic nature with a bit too much feral bluntness (his first act on screen is grabbing a two-headed lizard and eating it alive). Max has always been a man of few words, but Gibson always played his cunning, unapologetic survivalism with an edge of barely repressed sorrow and regret—emotional holdovers from the first film’s story of vengeance and loss. Gibson, who was probably the most emotionally vulnerable and anguished of all the ’80s hard-body action stars (which helps explain why he is almost always tortured in his films), managed to convey wells of depth with steely glances and whiplash body language, something that Hardy is not able (or willing) to replicate. Instead, he plays Max as a guttural creature of the desert who speaks in grunts and crude gestures, as if he has literally lost the ability to speak, rather than the desire. As the film progresses he becomes more and more recognizably human, and that is clearly the point, but Hardy overplays the character’s merging with the wasteland he inhabits.

Luckily, Miller has other characters to lean on. Theron’s one-armed Furiosa is a fascinating warrior with a cause, although all the high talk of the film’s feminist revisionism (and the idiotic Men’s Movement complaining about such) overstates what is essentially a gendered twist on the same basic plot device in almost all of the Mad Max films. The series has always had a strong female component, at least since The Road Warrior, and Furiosa’s quest to save the scantily clad concubines from their indentured sex servitude resonates on multiple levels. With her shaved head and axle-greased face, Theron pulses with a relentless moral intensity. She will do virtually anything to right the wrongs of the world she inhabirs, and unlike other characters with whom Max has allied himself, she is not primarily out for herself. The women she seeks to save (Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton) are at first just exemplars of imprisoned female beauty, but they eventually come into their own as fighters and survivors. Also on hand is Nicholas Hoult (Warm Bodies) as Nux, one of Immortan Joe’s most fervid devotees who eventually finds himself disillusioned with his perceived calling, which allows the film to digress temporarily into conflicted issues of hero worship and the cult of personality.

Politics—gender or otherwise—are really just window dressing, though, as Mad Max: Fury Road is fundamentally a feature-length chase scene, in which Max and Furiosa lead Joe and his rabid minions on a multi-day chase (the film was shot almost entirely in the rust-colored deserts of Namibia), at times drawing the attention of other vicious gangs out to protect their territory and/or steal what they can, before doubling back and returning to their point of origin. Miller and his production team have imagined a fully realized world that has emerged from the ashes of our own, with characters and vehicles pieced together from shreds and scraps of the familiar and the arcane. Some of it makes fundamental sense, and some of it is just weird for it’s own sake (particularly a blind, guitar-shredding freak who is strapped to the front of a truck spewing both metal power chords and flames from his instrument). There is so much of everything at once that you can’t quite appreciate the depth of it all, which is why Fury Road might perhaps be a better film on second (or third, or tenth) viewing.

Cinematographer John Seale, who previously worked with Miller on his affecting family drama Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) and essentially came out of retirement to lens Fury Road, makes the film look as though it were etched out of rust. The dominant colors are the orange-red of the sand and rocks and the intense blue of the sky, which immediately distinguishes the film visually from the steely bluish-gray palette of so many action films today. The world may have descended into chaos, but it’s a beautiful chaos that Miller renders with an expert’s sense of timing and rhythm. The heavy reliance on actual stunts and locations gives Fury Road an important sense of vivid presence, and even when Miller pushes the laws of physics to his advantage, it works, unlike the ludicrous computer-generated action in Furious Seven (2015). Miller certainly relies on CGI, but it is always in the service of images that couldn’t be otherwise created. When the wildly attired vehicles of the cobbled-together future roar through the sand and smash into each other and roll down dunes in fiery balls of twisted metal, the physicality makes the film exhilaratingly, furiously alive.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (3.5)




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