Mad Max: Fury Road review

MAD Max: Fury Road comes out on Thursday and it may just be the best action film you will see all year. Here’s our review.

IN THE wasteland of Hollywood action movies -- where over-the-top CGI slugfests, low-stakes drama, and disposable, interchangeable stock characters reign like some kind of masked mutant biker gang leader -- Mad Max: Fury Road arrives like a gut-punch, a visceral return to the sort of R-rated genre pictures of yore that never underestimated their audience, nor took them for granted.

It’s been 30 years since we last saw Mad Max on the big screen, in the Road Warrior-lite Beyond Thunderdome, and a lot has changed since then. Not just in what passes for action franchise moviemaking today, but also in the world of the post-apocalyptic antihero himself.

Mel Gibson -- long the standard-bearer of V8 Interceptors, dusty leather couture, and a haunted, tragic past -- is gone, replaced by Tom Hardy in what has now become an ageless role. Yes, Max Rockatansky is eternal, as is his plight in the freakish and horrifying Australian outback that exists in the wake of the vaguely defined global catastrophe that frames these films.

That ambiguous backstory has always been a hallmark for director George Miller’s series, and it allows the filmmaker to reset Fury Road just a tad. Is this a remake, a reboot, a sequel, or some mix of all three? Who can say, and it doesn’t really matter anyway; the world painted here is reminiscent of the previous films in the series, but also next level, taking the evolution of the End of the World to its next logical, jarring, yet at times beautiful place.

When we first meet Hardy’s Max, he’s seemingly stuck somewhere between The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome -- still in command of his glorious, supercharged V8 from the former film, but also sporting the long locks of the latter. A chase begins almost immediately -- a mere appetiser for the almost feature-length pursuit that makes up the guts of Fury Road -- and results in Max being taken captive in the Citadel, the mountain headquarters of the ghastly Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also played the main bad guy in the very first Mad Max film back in 1979).

Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa steals the show.

Joe is the monstrously scarred leader of a pasty-skinned cult of “War Boys,” and it’s here that the imaginative mix of Fury Road’s horror and beauty is truly first glimpsed. Immortan Joe’s world is one where the steering wheel is a symbol of worship -- and why shouldn’t it be when precious, precious gasoline is the lifeblood of these people? -- and where the War Boys pledge their lives, and sacrificial deaths, to their leader. “I live, I die! I live again!” they scream as they inexplicably spray-paint their mouths chrome in their last moments before killing themselves in combat. Nicholas Hoult, previously spray-painted blue for the X-Men movies, is one such devotee. He’s called Nux, and he doesn’t know what a tree is. Because, end of the world.

Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa is a high-ranking war lord of Immortan Joe’s, and she’s also arguably the main character of the film. Max’s equal in physicality, driving skills, and tortured past, the one-armed Furiosa stands at the forefront of a cast chock-full of imposing female characters that also includes “The Wives” -- a quintet of young beauties including Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Zoë Kravitz -- and a group of gun-toting, dirt-bike riding grannies who almost steal the show. Of course, Miller has often excelled in such portrayals; see Virginia Hey’s Warrior Woman from The Road Warrior or Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity from Beyond Thunderdome.

It is Imperator Furiosa’s imperative to secretly transport The Wives away from their master, Immortan Joe, something which the skull-mouthpiece wearing freak cannot abide. “We are not things!” the Wives proclaim, although Joe begs to differ. Once he realises that Furiosa’s hit the road -- the Fury Road! -- with his brides, the film’s centrepiece chase begins. Furiosa pilots the gargantuan truck-car-thing the War Rig with a nebulous and possibly mythical “green” land as their destination, but Joe’s fleet of makeshift and cobbled together vehicles are in hot -- and, thanks to Miller’s knack for directing practical car stunts -- ingenious pursuit. And Max, of course, is also along for the ride.

Mel Gibson is gone, and Max is replaced with Tom Hardy.

That’s a good way of putting it, actually. Because Hardy’s Max, partially masked for half the film, bound for another chunk, is practically a supporting character in his own movie. The actor ably channels the world-weary yet ever resourceful qualities of the character, though he’s missing a certain spark -- that slightly winking edge -- that Gibson conveyed as Max. Theron makes up for this as Furiosa, whose past is filled in just enough that we come to realise why she would betray Joe in the first place. Thankfully, there’s never even a hint of a love story between Max and Furiosa. And why should there be?

Fury Road frequently subverts such expectations. Not that any Mad Max fan would anticipate (or want) romance for the character, but Miller works hard to keep the viewer off-balance in general. A particular arc involving one of The Wives sets up a storytelling trope, then does a 180-degree turn away from that, then sets up another trope before doing yet another 180. And this is all capped off by one of the secondary villains, Nathan Jones’ perfectly named Rictus Erectus, delivering a moment of genuine pathos as he yells plaintively into the wind. Brilliant.

I do wonder how the typical moviegoer will react to Fury Road’s unwillingness to play by 2015’s mainstream multiplex rules. But the trailers for this film haven’t lied; the action is insane, even more so when one considers that so much of it was achieved via practical means, and that a large part of the movie is made up of that central chase. Those seeking high-speed thrills won’t be disappointed. Ditto anyone who’s supercharged by the prospect of a post-metal band led by a fire-shooting-guitar maestro in the midst of combat, by toothy chastity belts or weird mutant bird men, or by the many other oddities that have always been a touchstone of the Mad Max films.

The Verdict

The over-the-top stunts and eccentric characters and designs are all hugely important to Fury Road, as are the troubled figures like Max himself and Furiosa, but it’s the overriding sense of the film’s uniqueness, its striving to be something more than just another action movie, that is most impressive. Mad Max: Fury Road is a one of a kind. Like the world it creates, it is a thing of beautiful brutality. 9/10

This article originally appeared on IGN.