Review – Mad Max: Fury Road

From its opening scene, Mad Max: Fury Road grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. It is apologetically unrelenting, never letting its heroes, or the audience, stop to catch their breath.

The film opens with a disheveled, bearded and clearly broken Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) wandering along a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland. He is haunted by his past, specifically his inability to save people in need. But he barely has time to sulk before he is captured by the War Boys, working for Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who take him back to their home to be used as a universal blood donor for their soldiers.

Just as that is beginning to settle in, we see Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who also works for Immortan Joe, going rogue during a supply run, veering off into the desert in her rig. Joe dispatches his soldiers to chase after Furiosa and Nux (Nicholas Hoult), the War Boy getting blood from Max, decides to strap Max to the front of his vehicle so that he can continue to get blood while joining in on the chase.

This leads, of course, to Max inadvertently being set free and stumbling across Furiosa, discovering that she ran in order to liberate Joe’s young wives, one of whom is soon to give birth to his child. Max and Furiosa must settle into an uneasy partnership in order to both secure their freedom.

That may sound like a lot to process, but all of that set up is thrown at you at a frenetic pace in a few brief opening scenes. And once the audience has enough information to track with the plot, the rest of the film is a two-hour long chase with the War Boys never far behind Max, Furiosa and the wives.

The chase is brutal and intense. As an audience member, you never get much time to relax, which really connects you to the heroes in the story. Typically, action movies find points to slow down the pace in order to give you a breather and to fill you in on more character development and backstory. But writer/director George Miller has no interest in these quieter moments.

Part of me wishes he had taken a bit more time to fill us in on a few more details. I got a sense of who all of the major players in the movie were and why I should care about them or despise them, but it was only a shallow understanding at best. I could tell Joe wasn’t a good guy, but was never really offered many concrete details on the tyranny of his reign or how he amassed so much power. Similarly, I never got a full understanding of what Furiosa’s role was in his regime, how she rose to a position of power and what made her finally decide to break free.

While the lack of information was, at times, frustrating, I honestly didn’t have much time to dwell on it since my eyes were constantly feasting on new and exciting action scenes. Obviously, in a film like this, action will always be more important than plot or character development (though action with no plot or character development ends up feeling hollow and boring) and Miller certainly delivers on the action front.

Plus, the film is absolutely beautiful to look at. It takes place primarily in a desert with a limited color palette, but somehow Miller makes the whole thing look rich and vibrant. And every shot is wonderfully and intriguingly composed. Miller is constantly playing with space in the frame and with what is happening just off-screen. It has the pacing and the chaos of a rock music video, but shot by a true auteur.

Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy both give wonderful performances as the two leads and I greatly enjoyed the two of them attempting to outmaneuver one another in their early interactions. (There is a particularly fun scene in the very beginning where Max has a gun trained on all of the women and is wordlessly gesturing for them to hand over a never-ending cache of hidden weapons that he continues to find before they can be wielded against him.) I also really enjoyed Nicholas Hoult’s tragic performance as Nux and Riley Keough’s charming portrayal of Capable, one of Joe’s wives. (It’s worth noting that Keough, who is Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s oldest grandchild and Zoe Kravitz, the daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, both play Joe’s wives in the film.) And speaking of Joe, Hugh Keays-Byrne does some amazing scene chewing as the larger-than-life villain.

(Fun side note: Scrolling through the cast list, you see how much fun Miller had with character names. Rictus Erectus, Cheedo the Fragile, The People Eater, The Doof Warrior and The Winchman are just a few of the colorful character titles used by Miller.)

Mad Max: Fury Road may not be the most complex or deep action film ever made, but what it lacks in backstory and character development it more than makes up for in style and action. And it is nice to see a big, explosive summer blockbuster filled with so many memorable and powerful heroines. So if you are craving a big, colorful action film, I highly recommend checking it out. Just make sure you take a Xanax first.

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.