There’s no way to get around this fact…”Mad” Max Rockatansky is coming back to the public consciousness. In just a few days, audiences are going to be blown away by Mad Max: Fury Road, the latest installment in/reboot of George Miller’s iconic franchise. This is the fourth time that writer/director Miller has looked at the post apocalyptic landscape through the experiences of Max, this time played by Tom Hardy instead of Mel Gibson. Here, with Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller has delivered what my colleagues are calling the best movies of the year so far. I won’t go that far, but it’s certainly one of the better action flick in some time…and yes, it’s essentially a two hour chase film, as has been the rumor.
Plot isn’t a huge deal in this film, but it does work to mostly establish the kind of world that the movie takes place in so that a prolonged chase can ensue. We initially meet Max on the run from the minions of Immortan Joe, who basically owns the wasteland since he controls the water supply. Caught and literally used as a blood bag by “war boy” Nux, Max is basically left for dead, until Nux is among those sent after Imperator Furiosa, a renegade who’s hijacked a war rig and has some of Joe’s slave girls as her cargo, headed towards a hopeful freedom. Max ends up freed from Nux and along for the ride with Furiosa, as Joe’s legions give chase. It’s a simple premise, just done to absolute excess. Miller directs and co-writes with Nick Lathouris and Brendan McCarthy, while in addition to Hardy the cast includes Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, and more. They all come together to make this dystopian vision really sing.
Honestly, while I really enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road, I wasn’t quite as blown away by it as most of my colleagues seem to be. It’s quite good, but one long chase, essentially split up into three or four parts, grows tiresome after awhile. There’s very little dialogue here, and while the score and visuals are luscious, it sometimes winds up feeling like too much. It’s hard to complain about having too much of a good thing, as it were, but that’s kind of how I feel. Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably among the dozen best things of 2015 so far, [...]
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