Tom Hardy (Jasin Boland/Village Roadshow Films)
The best and fastest action movie of the summer begins with its hero standing still, if not at ease. We first see Max Rocktansky (Tom Hardy) from the back, facing a brutal desert landscape that’s a post-apocalyptic version of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.” A two-headed lizard crawls into the frame like something out of Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant. You thought Nicolas Cage was crazy in that? Max eats the lizard.
Mad Max: Fury Road is that rarest of blockbusters: a work of art with negative space and downtime; an action movie where you can follow all the action; a thriller whose intensity is driven by emotion as much as it is by motion.
Eating the two-headed lizard is symbolic; Max is emasculated for the first third of the film, a dusty, hairy beast captured and shorn by members of a menacing Citadel lorded over by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Chained and masked through the film’s first acts, Hardy is left to act with his eyes, and he doesn’t generate the intensity of someone trapped in a cage. Mel Gibson’s eyes (or Charlize Theron’s) would be crazy enough to project menace through this mask, but Hardy is too solid a presence.
The thing with Max is that however many two-headed lizards he might eat, however many flashbacks torment him with pictures of loved ones he couldn’t save, he’s still more human and less mad than most of what’s left of civilization. The actor’s steadiness works against the madness, something to hold on to while the world goes, not just mad, but fast. Still, I can’t help but mentally cast a more volatile actor as Max: Elvis Presley, who moved like a wild animal and would have been a hell of an action hero.
The film is a contrast of howling deserts and CGI dust storms, like an earth-sized wet-dry vac pumped up to 11. The people of the Mad Max films have treasured precious fluids before, but this time it isn’t just about gasoline. The Immortan controls the water supply, teasing its citizens with wasteful bursts, then shutting off the valve long before anyone can have their fill. Water and oil are commodities but so are blood and mother’s milk.
The Citadel goes mad when the Immortan’s favorite, Imperator Furisoa (Theron), takes a detour from a scheduled gas run. She’s also taken something that belongs to the Immortan with her. An enraged convoy chases Furiosa’s war rig, one pursuer led by a flame throwing guitarist shredding in front of a speaker bank. Max is used as a living blood bag by Nux (Nicholas Hoult}, one of the white corpselike men who follow their leader and dream of going to Valhalla, for which they’d prepare themselves by spraying their mouth with Rustoleum so they’ll be ready to go to what they must imagine is a chrome bumper afterlife.
Nicholas Hoult, Courtney Eaton, Riley Keough, Charlize Theron and Abbey Lee Kershaw (Jasin Boland/Vilalge Roadshow Pictures)Mad Max: Fury Road is a road movie about a simple delivery run and return home, set in a world where that simple journey is fraught with explosions. But what you came for is the action, and it’s here as only director George Miller can do it.
One of my favorite shots in the Mad Max series is in the 1979 film. Max’s wife Jesse runs with her baby down a highway, desperately trying to evade rogue bikers. The scene cuts to the bike gang speeding away as the child’s rubber ball and shoe fall to the asphalt. It’s the simplest sequence but with a series of clean shots Miller efficiently conveyed the excitement and terror of the road. The director expanded on this vision for The Road Warrior, which was then the wildest car chase movie ever, but its New Wave Wrestlemania dystopia seems more dated than the first film’s more ordinary future.
Unless you count the Happy Feet movies, Miller hasn’t made an action movie in thirty years, but the 70-year-old director takes today’s action movies to school. I don’t have to tell you to go see Mad Max: Fury Road, but you may wonder if it lives up to the over-the-top buzz. Temper expectations if you must; Miller’s return to his post-apocalyptic vocation may not be the best action movie EVER, but it’s the best action movie in a long, long time.
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Directed by George Miller
Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris
With Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult
Rated R for intense sequences of violence throughout, and for disturbing images
Running time 120 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you.
