Review #916: 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015)

Attempting to piece together the chronology of Max Rockatansky's four-movie journey between 1979 and 2015 would be to miss the point of the series altogether. Max Max (1979) was a raw slice of grindhouse that just happened to be financially successful and genuinely brilliant, and has since evolved into something so wildly imaginative and increasingly insane that to try and piece together how many years have elapsed since Mel Gibson's youthful Main Force Patrol officer watch his family murdered and how he has suddenly shrunk and become Tom Hardy would be as deranged as the franchise's latest instalment, Fury Road.

Whether it's a re-boot or a continuation of the story we haven't seen since 1985's Beyond Thunderdome, we are plunged back into the familiar, post-apocalyptic Australian plains (although it was shot in Namibia) inhabited by obscene punks, raging warlords and ragged rebels. Following a nuclear holocaust, fuel and water is scarce, and the residents of the Citadel are ruled over by the ageing Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a hulking monster of a man with a breathing apparatus strapped to his face. Max (Hardy) is captured and is used as a 'blood bag' for War Boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult), and when Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), one of Joe's lieutenants, goes AWOL with an armoured truck full of Joe's many wives, Nux and a small army pursue with Max strapped to the front of his vehicle.

Like its predecessors, Fury Road has little in way of a plot. Similar in many ways to Max Max 2, the film is little more than one huge chase with precious few quiet moments in between. Hardy is as reserved a Max as Gibson was, but strangely lacks the charisma that has propelled Hardy to recent superstardom. Yet Max is more in the background, playing second fiddle to the battering ram that is Furiosa. One-armed, shaven-headed and raccoon-eyed, Theron is in equal measures extremely sexy and utterly intimidating, offering glimpses of vulnerability as her trust in Max becomes more cemented. Furiosa's drive is that she wants to get back to her homeland, which is now little more than a distant memory from her childhood, and Max just happens to be along for the ride. But character development is left in the dust of what is ultimately one humongous chase set-piece.

Although he is now 70 and his recent work has consisted of Happy Feet (2006), Happy Feet 2 (2011) and Babe: Pig in the City (1998), director, writer and producer George Miler shows no signs of losing his touch. Fury Road is the most aggressive Max Max yet, complete with acrobats on huge wires who bend into other vehicle's to attack from above, War Boys getting themselves pumped for violence by spraying a powerful drug called Night Fume onto their lips, and an electric guitar player who sprays flame from his instrument and is backed by a hoard of drummers. Everyone involved in creating the stunts should be extremely proud, as what could have been repetitive turns into a two-hour adrenaline rush. It's not the masterpiece that it has been heralded by critics and audiences alike, but it has breathed life back into a genre stuffed with CGI and former wrestlers.


Directed by: George Miller
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Josh Helman, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoë Kravitz
Country: Australia/USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie