Miller has never been too interested in fashioning rounded personalities, nor is he concerned with intricate plotting. He’s still not the most complex of characters, mind you. Besides, it’s the first time that Max has seemed properly mad. True, he isn’t sure whether his accent should be Australian, American or English, but he makes Rockatansky a tortured, haunted outsider, with the wary savagery of a cornered animal, and just a few counterbalancing glimmers of Aussie blokeyness. Nonetheless, there’s no doubt that Hardy is twice the actor that Gibson ever was. I would have loved to see the same Max 30 years on, roaming the desert like a post-apocalyptic Moses, with a long white beard and a shotgun. But over the course of the next two films, his milieu becomes more desolate and strange, while Max becomes a grizzled, anti-social nomad. In the first film, Gibson looks so fresh-faced and clean-cut that he could have stepped off the set of Neighbours, while the supposed wasteland he patrols is actually a leafy suburb. One of the fascinating aspects of the original Mad Max trilogy is how Max and his surroundings grow more barbaric with each instalment. It’s a shame that Mel Gibson couldn’t be persuaded to don his biker jacket once again.
As this X-rated cross between The Wacky Races and a Marilyn Manson concert picks up speed, the only person who can keep the baddies at bay is the film’s reluctant hero, Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy). Naturally, most of them are shirtless and painted white, and one of them is playing a flame-throwing guitar while he perches on the back of a truck. Joe’s troops jump into their hot rods and set off in pursuit. But one of his toughest lieutenants, Imperator Furiosa (a steely Charlize Theron), rebels against him by driving his “wives” away into the desert in an armoured lorry. He also has a harem of nubile captives (Rosie Huntingdon-Whitely and Zoë Kravitz among them) to bear his children. In his fortress, built into a cliff, he harvests organs from men in metal cages and drinks milk supplied by lactating women. The villain is Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), godlike ruler of a gnarled and ragged tribe. In Fury Road, things are more extravagantly crazy than ever. Welcome to a land where everyone sports punk hairdos and leather bondage gear, and people are named Aunt Entity and Dr Dealgood as a matter of course. It’s the gusto and flair with which it commits to that absurdity that makes it so exciting.
Given that (a) this future world consists largely of sand, and (b) petrol is in short supply, it’s odd that the populace should be so devoted to the internal combustion engine, but Miller’s franchise was always absurd. When Miller made his trilogy three decades ago, it seems, he was just revving up.įor the benefit of the uninitiated, the Mad Max films are set in a lawless post-apocalyptic dystopia where oil is scarce, and bands of scavengers career around in souped-up stock cars. And yet, somehow, this explosive new barrage of action and eccentricity isn’t only a faithful continuation of the series, it’s also its exhilarating high point. You might assume, then, that Fury Road would join The Phantom Menace on the scrapheap reserved for unloved revivals. The first Mad Max film to be made by George Miller in 30 years, this belated reboot is missing its original star, Mel Gibson, and its director has spent the intervening years on such children’s fare as Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City. well, the results can be The Phantom Menace, Prometheus, or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: legacy-tarnishing messes that fans try to forget. When the creator of a 1970s/1980s blockbuster franchise decides to dust it off again decades later, the results can be.
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