Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, Dir. George Miller):
Mad Max: Fury Road is not many things. It is not subtle, complex, or original. But it is most definitely a George Miller film, and for that we should breathe a sigh of relief. Back in the ’80s, Miller brought the thunder from Down Under with his original Mad Max series, reshaping the landscape of action films even as he tore the Australian Outback to pieces. It’s been three decades since we last saw Miller’s Max Rockatansky, aka the Road Warrior, and during those three decades the action film genre has undergone its share of convulsions, to the point that the classic Road Warrior (1982), a film which overwhelmed audiences at the time of its release with its gonzo intensity, now seems like a model of restraint. After an idiosyncratic directing career that has included talking pigs and tap-dancing penguins, the 70-year Miller is now back on his home turf, but what could he bring to the party in 2015?
Plenty, as it turns out. Less a re-imagining than a retrofit, Mad Max: Fury Road pieces together motifs from The Road Warrior (1982) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and like the early Mad Max films of yore, finds the sublime in the ridiculous. As always, we’re set in the savage deserts of a post-apocalyptic world. As always, there’s eye-popping vehicular slaughter, crinkly gallows humor, grotesque side characters, and fetishistic leather-wear and instruments of death. As always, there’s the stoic figure of Mad Max (Tom Hardy taking over for Mel Gibson) himself, the archetypal lone-wolf hero who is more insane than everyone around him because he actually might have a conscience. As always, plotting and dialogue are reduced to their elemental essence, leaving plenty of room for everyone to rev their engines and take to the roads in search of gas and blood. This time around blood is on everyone’s mind, as Max is taken prisoner by the freaky white-skinned denizens of the Citadel, where plasma and healthy bodies are in short supply. Strapping Max to the front of their trucks as their “blood bag,” the warriors of the Citadel must hunt down Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a traitor who has stolen some blood of her own: the fertile concubines of Citadel leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, familiar to Mad Max viewers as the Toecutter from the original film). Hijacking a “war rig” that is a tanker on steroids, Furiosa and the fair maidens seek sanctuary in “the green place of many mothers,” and before you can say Damnation Alley, all the principals are rocketing off down Fury Road, through parched wastelands and canyons (shot in Namibia), everything distilled to chaser and chased, kill or be killed.
Fury Road isn’t as clean in its progress as The Road Warrior; the opening scenes in the Citadel are a little too drunk on their baroque imagery, the baddies (with the exception of Immortan Joe) aren’t supplied with memorable quirks, and Miller’s few stabs at characterization are half-hearted at best (for Max, all we get are fractured flashbacks of his late daughter, including flash-cuts of buggy eyeballs just to weird us out). Fortunately, in all other departments Miller still has vim and vigor. Like a genial mad scientist, he throws just about everything you can imagine onto the screen, and most of it sticks. Tricked-out detachable steering wheels, assault cars bristling with spikes like hedgehogs, practical stunts in which no machine or human is safe, firebombs and harpoons, bullet cartridges ricocheting off a very pregnant belly, a convoy motivated by a truck hauling taiko drummers and one tenacious heavy-metal guitarist (yes, the tip of the guitar is a flamethrower), and most breathtaking of all, long poles mounted atop battle-cars, all the better for the baddies to swoop down from above, like Cirque du Soleil motorheads. Pulling out every weapon in his cinematic arsenal, Miller shoots for maximum impact: stuttery frames, impossibly low angles, fluid tracking shots around and through the action, crystal-clear geography and choreography in every cut. Where most action directors go frenetic and press the pace to goose the audience along, Miller is balletic in his rhythms — a whirling dervish of violence there, a long breath to ratchet up the suspense here. The movie may subsist on forward momentum, but it’s the moments between the mayhem that linger: Furiosa staring steely-eyed into her rear-view mirror, on the watch for an ambush, or the incongruous sight of fair maidens clothed in white hunkered down in the twisted gray and black cab of the War Rig.
“Hope is a mistake. If you can’t fix what’s broken you’ll go insane.”
— Mad Max
Unlike the previous Mad Max movies, Fury Road is a two-hander, as both Theron and Hardy share center stage. Theron’s line readings are flat but she cuts a striking figure with her petroleum war paint and a prosthetic arm that wouldn’t be out of place on a Transformer mecha. Hardy, on the other hand, specializes in soulful lunks, and his performance as Max is slyly underplayed. He holds us at arm’s length for most of the movie, his dialogue restricted to grunts and drier-than-sand one-liners — he’s more feral than Mel Gibson was as the character, yet by the end he’s revealed to be more sensitive, too. As a gesture to changing mores, Miller throws a few curveballs into his narrative: the good guys this time around turn out to be tough-ass women (specifically, a crew of motorcycle grannies), the bad guys hoard water as well as gas, and a plea is made for a more eco-friendly future. While other Mad Max movies concluded on a tempered note, this one goes all the way for full uplift, which rings a little hollow given the grit that the rest of the film provides in abundance. Still, all this is forgiven and forgotten during the film’s final mad dash for glory, as Max, Furiosa and their band must plow through the ranks of the bad guys. Miller may be revisiting the past with Fury Road rather than striking out in new directions, and there is plenty of indulgence on display, but this is no pale attempt to recapture lost glories. Brawny and spirited, the film is a reminder how much fun the action genre can be when it’s in the hands of a director who still can find the poetry in pulp.
