Mad Max: Fury Road

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: George Miller/Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult and Hughes Keays-Byrne

Mad Max returns though in this incarnation, the august Tom Hardy assumes the character we have all come to know (and love?). Director George Miller, Master of all Automotive Carnage, also returns to the series he has made iconic in the action film genre. Mad Max: Fury Road comes with requisite car chases, guns, post-apocalyptic, ghoulish villains and nary a moment of pause in all its fury. Aside from a few CGI moments, we mostly see intricately orchestrated action scenes, which is quite a relief. Though Miller's film is fun, somehow it lacks The Road Warrior's sense of purpose and urgency. In that film, Max has to deliver petrol across a deserty expanse while fighting off frightening legions of creeps and grotesqueries. The new film features a deserty drive and battles with freaks of every variety but somehow I had to keep reminding myself it was all for some purpose.

The new bad guy, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), is such an over-the-top character conception he makes Lord Humungous seem timidly imagined. A wild shock of white hair and a mask that gives him the terrifying countenance of a grinning skeleton abets Joe's tyrannical presence; an appearance designed for maximum intimidation.

We see Max trying to outrun Joe's minions on the open road as the film begins. We figure Max is up to his old tricks; surviving by his wits, his wheels and his capacity to return in kind everything Joe's albino-ish skinhead minions can mete out. Max is overtaken and captured, where he is imprisoned in a fortress-like canyon. He manages to escape after some brawling but is eventually subdued. Meanwhile, a tough-looking woman in Joe's service; Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), is assigned a mission driving a rig for a fuel run. After leaving the canyon fortress, she deviates from her task and the road with her multi-vehicled escort in hot pursuit. Strapped to the grill of one such vehicle in a sacrificial manner is Max, who awaits an almost certain violent death by collision. Only a short time later, Joe mobilizes a fleet of ludicrously and lethally modified vehicles to give chase to the wayward Furiosa.

Why would Furiosa willingly incur Joe's wrath by taking flight? We learn the answer to that question in time but as she races into the desert and into the angriest dust storm you will ever see, Joe's minions do their level best to bring her vehicle to a halt.

In a post-apocalyptic world where gasoline is a priceless commodity, giving chase with a fleet of cars seems to betray an inconsistent and implausible attitude about the cavalier usage of fuel but so it goes.

Furiosa manages to fight off the escort but not before a collision with the car holding Max frees him. Well, almost. Having outlasted the escort--and the asphyxiating dust storm, Furiosa's rig comes to a stop. A skin-head named Nux (Nicholas Hoult), who managed to attach himself to her vehicle before being flung from it, lies unconscious in the sand. Emerging from the rig with Furiosa are several beautiful, vestal virgin-like women. We learn the women, who are wives of sorts to Joe, have escaped with Furiosa's help and are to be taken to the Green Place; an Edenic land of bounty that may or may not exist. But Max holds Furiosa and the women at gunpoint, demanding they remove the metallic mask over his mouth. A brawl breaks out between Max and the women while Nux, waking from sand, joins the fray. The fight is wonderfully choreographed and as elaborate as any of the car chase sequences.

After the hostilities, Max and Furiosa arrive at an uneasy detente. Seeing Joe's forces racing furiously toward them in the distance, they drive on.

As Joe's gang begins to gain on Furiosa's rig, other marauding clans join the chase. A detour into a dangerous canyon, where yet another clan on motorcycles menace Max and Furiosa, allows them means to escape when rocky rubble bars their pursuer's path.

In time, Furiosa, Max, and their new ally Nux decide-with bewildering reasoning--to attack Joe's fortress, which means battling he and his newly augmented force en route. This plot development seems hair-brained and hard to swallow but I suppose Miller needed some sort of narrative device to force a showdown. At this point in the film, I felt its already flimsy logic had completely come undone but if you can accept a story where gasoline and bullets seem to be in infinite abundance despite knowledge to the contrary, I suppose one can accept anything.

I don't know that Miller expects us to derive much meaning from the nightmarish world we see onscreen but not having a point is maybe the point of the Mad Max films. Who is Max now? Do we care? Is he merely a bad-ass who will never find peace in a world where Darwinian socialism has run amok?

I don't think Miller does much with Max's character but Furiosa seems more interesting. We get a little back-story on her and we learn that she, like Max and many others, has endured hardship and loss in her life. The fact that her missing lower arm doesn't squelch her gritty toughness says much about her. Furiosa is not a woman who needs Max or anyone else. It's also interesting to find she knows her rig inside and out and is ingenious enough to devise an intricate series of kill switches to thwart would-be car-jackers. I really liked Charlize Theron in her role as Furiosa. She is unafraid to mute her good looks to play the ragged and dirty hellioness-of-the road but still manages to bring a fun, feminized element to the story.

Tom Hardy, with his rugged features and action film credentials, seems like a logical choice to play Max. Max's laconic nature seems well-suited for the taciturn actor. Whether he can make Max his own is contingent on Miller's plans for furthering the series.

The film itself felt at times like a self-parody and self-satire with its hyperbolic mayhem and cartoonishly malevolent villains. I still had fun watching it but wasn't blown away as I was with The Road Warrior, which I feel is still the best of the series. The film didn't bring a definitively end to the saga so it seems open-ended. Will Max ever find peace? Will he find sanctuary from the reigning chaos of his world? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Miller's film is well made but it didn't quicken my pulse. The choreographed action scenes are still impressive but Mad Max: Fury Road is more a technical achievement than an electrifying action movie. I've seen all the ghouls before and the car chases to nowhere but somehow nothing managed to stick. Miller can be commended for his old school approach to action movie-making but maybe Max's retirement is nigh.