Rating
Synopsis
When Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) makes off with a bunch of her Imperial Overlord’s wives, she teams up with Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) to fight off the warrior hordes, sand, flame thrower guitars and more sand while they attempt to reach the green, green grass of home in one long ass car chase.
MPAA Rating
Rated R, probably because the bad guy is a bit on the gross side. Although my 10 year old nephew enjoyed this movie a hell of a lot more than I did so they probably missed a trick in not pushing for a PG certification
Plot
Set in a post apocalyptic Australian wasteland (or pre-apocalyptic central Australia, I’m not sure), gasoline and water are scarce commodities and one man has the monopoly – Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). An imperialistic ruler, Joe controls an underground source of fresh water and uses it to control his army of misfits, weirdos and scantly clad supermodel wives. It’s pretty clear that with some careful planning and a simple irrigation system life could soon thrive again but instead Joe decides to haphazardly and inefficiently dump thousands of gallons of water at a time onto his subjects heads – this kind of wanton waste sets the tone for the rest of the movie, from a resource conservation point of view
Imperator Furiosa (Theron), Joe’s top Imperon and one armed hard ass, decides she can’t hack it anymore and on a routine gasoline supply run to, well, Gas Town, she takes her War Rig (giant truck) and detours off course towards her homeland – The Green Place. That probably wouldn’t be too bad except she took Immortan Joe’s five wives with her, one of which is pregnant. Joe, normally a calm and collected individual I imagine, loses his shit over this and demands that they be brought back immediately. With gasoline being scarce, he orders a thousand or so cars, trucks and motorbikes to depart from The Citadel, Gas Town and Bullet Town – where they make bullets – and give chase and bring back his wives. More importantly, he insists some dude plays power chords on a stupid giant flamethrower guitar
So far, nothing mad or maxy about this at all – cue Mad Max (Hardy), a meat bag of few words being held captive at the Citadel by The War Boys, Joe’s band of suicidal nut bags and used as a blood donor given his universal blood type. Nux (Nicholas Hoult) is a war boy eager to impress, but still receiving blood for injuries, he straps Max to front of his car with an intravenous line running between them so he can join the fight. Max is none too pleased about this arrangement
Upon catching the truck and exploding the mysterious hedgehog cars(?), Max manages to free himself when Nux’s suicide ploy to take out the truck only half succeeds. Upon approaching the truck, Max discovers Furiosa and all five wives having a water fight using a fire hose attached to the truck. Presumably disgusted by the abhorrent waste of a natural resource during a drought, Max commandeers the truck and leaves all behind to their own demise, however trucks aren’t as easy to drive as everyone thinks and soon he comes to a complete halt. Requiring the assistance of Furiosa to continue, they form a likely partnership and are soon best friends.
From there on out, Max and Furiosa must battle Joe and his hordes of muscle bound, fearless extremists to reach the Green Place. Will they have enough gasoline and bullets to make it? How many War boys will die before they run out of silver spray paint and Factor 50 sun cream? Probably and not enough.
Pros
- Fans of steampunk/dieselpunk will have plenty to gawk at
Cons
- Over stylized – too much concentration on visuals with very little in the way of script
- Characters are uninteresting dolls – I couldn’t care less who lived or died
- Action scenes repetitive and lacked any substance
- Tom Hardy sounded like he was impersonating Dustin Hoffman towards the end
- Pretty predictable
Verdict
The Mad Max series stopped being movies to me somewhere in the middle of Mad Max 2. It became more of a computer game, with repetitive action sequences; shallow, meaningless characters and mindless violence more suited to a game console/PC than a cinema (check out Borderlands or Fallout 3 for example). This reboot of the second movie offers nothing new other than a whole load of plot holes and nonsensical costumes. Characters lack any depth and are given no meaningful dialogue to the point that I didn’t care if they succeeded, I didn’t care if they died. Some well respected actors (Hardy, Theron, Hoult to begin with) are reduced to painted action (wo)men being pushed around a sand pit with some tonka toys by an invisible child.
Also, why use the same actor that played the Toecutter in Mad Max – Hugh Keays-Byrne – as the main villain if he is not going to reprise his former role (however truck mangled)? Did they think we wouldn’t recognize those eyes?? Whatever nuances and subtle messages the original (Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior) had this “revisiting” has replaced with near nude, desert shower scenes and footage of a guy playing flame thrower guitar! Really? Did it need to be in every second scene? There’s even a Wayne’s Worldesque extreme close up of the damn thing! Do yourself a favour and put the price of admission into a jar instead and use it to buy a thimbleful of fuel in a couple of years time. 2/10