Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi
2 hours
Rated: R
Written by: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nick Lathouris
Directed by: George Miller
Produced by: George Miller, Doug Mitchell, and P.J. Voeten
Cast:
Tom Hardy
Charlize Theron
Nicholas Hoult
Hugh Keays-Byrne
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
Riley Keough
Zoë Kravitz
Abbey Lee
Courtney Eaton
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE MAD
Australian filmmaker George Miller, despite a career of only having a handful of noticeably good motion-pictures, is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant minds working within the film industry to this very day. That genius began in the late 1970s with the cult classic: Mad Max, and of course was followed up remarkably with its brilliant apocalyptic sequel: The Road Warrior. Ignoring the disaster that was Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Miller has earned his respect as a creative genius with just these two brilliant motion-pictures alone. He took the elements of numerous exploitation genres, including road movies, carsploitation, revenge flicks, the Italian poliziotteschi films, and of course post-apocalyptic shockers, and combined them into a mélange in order to form something that no one had ever seen before, and something that would continue to be imitated both inside and outside the Ozploitation markets, never as effectively. When it was announced that Miller would be returning to this Frankenstein's monster of a genre that he had given birth too, many were worried it would not live up to the quality of its predecessors (excluding Beyond Thunderdome, of course). And with news of star Mel Gibson being replaced by the younger Tom Hardy, those fears grew more and more.
Whatever trepidation one may have had about Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth and presumably not final film of the franchise, were washed away the moment the film began rolling in theaters. Fury Road is a dark, gritty, violent, exciting, and yet still wonderfully human motion-picture that manages to encapsulate all the elements that worked well and them some from its predecessors.
Like any exploitation film the plot is simple, but it is because of this simplicity that it succeeds. We are given a broken and desolate universe, one that raises many questions (probably hundreds for those who hadn't seen the first three movies), and yet Miller expertly doesn't waste time in handing the audience detailed explanations about this world, about these characters, and about anything we are going to see. Like all successful exploitation movies, Fury Road assumes its audience is with it from the start for the entire ride, not once taking a detour down explanation road. Like the story the film's dialogue remains just as simplistic due to the fact that the bulk majority of the film doesn't warrant it. What conversations our characters have serve to move us forward from one exciting action set piece to the next, never hitting the brakes to let us marinate on what on earth is going on.
And Fury Road's action set pieces are undeniably its tour-de-force. Each one is as stunning and mind-blowing as the next, and by the story's conclusion one can't help but wonder just how those involved managed to plot so many that continuously built off of one another in such an awe-inspiring manner. Like all big-budget action films of today, the film is CGI heavy. In a very minor way this becomes irritating as it always does. However, Miller - an auteur of exploitation - understands this. In less capable hands, Fury Road could have been a CGI disaster in the vein of Transformers or Gods of Egypt. Instead, Miller's brilliance shines through, allowing the direction of the action sequences to rise to the top - essentially pushing the obvious visual trickery to the back of the viewer's mind and shifting focus to the pure exploitative entertainment unfolding before our very eyes.
Fury Road is not a movie that would require particularly believable performances, and yet the film is chock full of them, adding more to the over all quality of the final piece. The supporting cast of Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and Melissa Jaffer all give powerfully convincing performances adding to the film's merit. Even Tom Hardy, a performer whose previous works have been below subpar, manages to give a decent-enough performance as Max. Although one can't help but wonder if Hardy had been given more lines and less stunts would this have gone the other way? The film's most outstanding performance is delivered by Charlize Theron, who possibly puts forth what may be the best performance of her entire career - if not a strong contender for that title. Theron's Imperator Furiosa is powerfully believable and is what allows us as viewers to immediately buy into this story that could have otherwise been noted as being nothing more than B-movie quality. In other words, Theron's performance, and that of her supporting cast, injects a level of humanity into this simplistic action film.
When it is all said and done, Mad Max: Fury Road is a worthy sequel that manages to live up to the high expectations set by its brilliant and remarkable predecessors. And even with its few hiccups and excessive use of CGI, it is a fine example of why exploitation cinema, even to this very day, deserves its fair share of praise and recognition.
9/10
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