Mad Max: Fury Road
Rated : MA15+
Four out of five stars
Now showing
SUBTLETY in a Mad Max movie is like a pair of fluffy dice hanging in the windscreen: nice but something that gets in the way of the view.
And Mad Max: Fury Road, the long-awaited fourth installment in director George Miller’s enduring series, is all about the view.
No one is going to come to this film for finely wrought character development.
Max is by now as self-aware as he’s ever going to get (which doesn’t mean he’s not tormented).
We want car chases, stunts and explosions.
Fury Road is built around two of the first and delivers something like 500,000 of the other two, every single one meticulously, magnificently, gloriously staged and photographed.
There is something of a story to get things started.
Max is captured by the desert dwellers of the Citadel, led by crazed warlord Immortan Joe, to be used as a blood supply for Joe’s son Nux.
Joe’s lieutenant Furiosa sets off in her truck in a convoy to get fuel but is secretly planning an escape, taking with her Joe’s five young wives.
She makes her break, Joe sends his army of war boys in pursuit with Max strapped to the front of Nux’s car to provide nourishment, and the movie is off and running.
It’s sly humour and inversions firing on all cylinders.
Tom Hardy is well-cast as Max though there’s none of Mel Gibson’s creepy hair-trigger intensity.
But it’s Charlize Theron as Furiosa who drives the movie (literally: Max is the passenger seat more often than not). And she’s a better shot than he is.
They’re great together, because of, not despite, the least hint of romance, which is in short supply here.
Only Nux’s innocence allows him a glimpse. Just as the weird and monstrous cars and trucks of the film show what’s possible when pieces of the past are picked through and welded together, Miller and his very talented team have mined the Mad Max legacy and created something recognisable but wholly and triumphantly new.
It’s an insane ride, but the apocalypse has never looked so good.
WATCH THE TRAILER:
