Mad Max: Fury Road
How to describe the brutal and brilliant cinematic fireball that director George Miller hurls at us in Mad Max: Fury Road? Try hell on wheels, given the vehicular obsession that drives the film. It’s been 30 years since Miller, 70, moved on from the Mad Max trilogy that starred Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, a road warrior seeking vengeance for his murdered family. The place? A dystopian wasteland ruled by bike gangs and outlaws of every sadistic stripe. In the years since, Miller – an Aussie ER-doctor-turned-filmmaker – has gone on to the family-friendly oasis of Babe: Pig in the City and the animated penguins of two Happy Feet musical hits.
Welcome back, George. We missed you in the land of the dark and twisted. The long-incubating Mad Max: Fury Road is an R-rated, rocket- fueled romper-stomper, a nonstop chase epic powered by a reported $150 million budget and Miller’s indisputable visionary genius. One look at Max, and the kiddie fans of Happy Feet would be traumatized for life.
Does this ride down Fury Road always make sense? Not really. So what? Just go with it. The great Brit actor Tom Hardy steps in for Gibson as Max and does the role proud. As he tells us in voiceover, “My name is Max. My world is fire.” Gotcha, buddy. Haunted by visions of his lost child, Max is captured by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also played the villainous Toecutter in the first Mad Max), a wacked-out warlord who controls his subjects by controlling their water supply. Joe’s elite soldiers, the inbred, head-shaved war boys, smear on white body paint, swill breast milk to counteract radiation and enjoy the fanatical fantasy of an erotic afterlife: “I live, I die. I live again!”
The plot really goes vroom when Joe’s trusted ally Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a warrior with a mechanical left arm, goes rogue and takes off in an armored truck with Joe’s five breeder wives, played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton and Riley Keough. (Keough is Elvis’ grandkid – how’s that for iconography?) In hot pursuit are the war boys, led by Nux (a terrific Nicholas Hoult). The boys lash Max to a speeding car while tapping his arm for a grisly blood transfusion.
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