Furious George
Mad Max: Fury Road shouldn’t work; George Miller’s return to the franchise that made his name takes the conventional three-act film structure, drenches it in guzzoline and lets its burn. Instead of a series of peaks and troughs, Miller’s given his audience what basically amounts to one painstakingly staged, petrol-soaked 120 minute chase sequence that (almost) never takes its foot off the accelerator. It’s the third act of The Road Warrior writ large: blown-up, overcranked and completely out of control. There’s dialogue, but it’s drowned out by the sounds of revving engines, doomy guitars, and deafening explosions. Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, Fury Road ends up delivering the kind of primal, nerve-jolting experience that’s been missing from mainstream western action movies since Arnie took a very hot bath at the end of Terminator 2.
The film opens with Hardy’s Max, sounding like he swallowed a sub-woofer, recounting his turbulent, tragic past. Haunted by visions of the family he couldn’t save and hunted by his fellow wastelanders, Fury Road’s version of Max isn’t the stoic anti-hero seen in previous instalments, but a fractured man, his mind unravelled after years spent desperately fighting for survival. Cinema-goers expecting the kind of sparkly-eyed action hero who dispatches the bad guys with a swagger and a wink, will be in for surprise: Tony Stark may have flirted with PTSD, but this Max is, for the first time, genuinely mad.
To make matters worse, Max is abducted by a gang of marauders in the film’s opening few minutes. These milk-coloured muties drag their prize back to the Citadel, a natural fortress under the control of respirator-wearing big bad Immortan Joe, a brutal warlord who controls the region's water supply. Max is pressed into service as a kind of mobile blood bag, providing juice for Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a soldier in Joe’s army of bald-headed berserkers, who is called into action when Imperator Furiosa (Theron on savage form) goes rogue and spirits away Joe’s five wives. From there the chase is on, with Furiosa desperately trying to stay ahead of Joe’s war band and get her charges to safety
If that sounds like a simple story, it’s because it is. If you’re looking for grandiloquence, you’re not going to get it here: Fury Road is a lean film, one that knows actions speak louder than words. Film critics are always going on about how filmmakers need to show and not tell, and after watching Mad Max you get the feeling that this will be the film they hold up as an example from now on. It’s exactly this kind of hands-off storytelling that makes Fury Road so refreshing, especially in a world in which every blockbuster is a prequel to a spin-off that devotes half its runtime to setting up the threequel.
That’s not to say the film is lacking in the storytelling department: Miller and fellow scribes Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris have crafted a film of surprising depth. Almost every snatch of dialogue, every brief exchange and weather-worn prop, adds another splash of colour to this dust-caked, depraved world. Refresingly, Miller never feels the need to lecture his audience, communicating ideas with a subtlety and assurance that’s all too rare in the realm of science fiction.
Unlike some in its genre, Fury Road is a film that lives in the moment, challenging audiences to pay attention and put together the pieces of the puzzle themselves. On the surface, Max’s return to the multiplexes may be a simple chase movie, a kinetic, ultra-violent sprint from point A to point B, but there are so many little hints, allusions and visual details crammed into its 120 minutes that it’s impressive just how alive, organic and fleshed out the finished film feels.
It also succeeds in bringing to life one of the best female characters to hit the big screen in years in the form of Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa. From the Bride in Kill Bill to Ripley in Alien, genre movies have always had a place for capable leading ladies, and Furiosa is a welcome addition to this (sadly) limited pantheon of kick ass lady characters. Miller has gone on record as saying that Fury Road wasn’t intended as a feminist film, and I think that shows. What I mean is, the movie never comes across as a specious attempt to appeal to feminists, but rather an honest crack at creating the kind of gritty, driven character audiences root for, one who just happens to be a woman. And that, right there, is real equality.
The freshest, most invigorating action movie to roar onto our screens in quite some time, Fury Road is a post-apocalyptic powerhouse with a surprising amount of smarts and heart. Eccentric, bold and frequently breathtaking, it’s a timely reminder of just how electrifying an honest-to-goodness, no holds barred action movie can be.
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