Cinematic sequels are notorious for padding their companies’ coffers and their derivative plots. George Miller brings his “Mad Max” franchise of “Mad Max” (1979), “Mad Max 2” (1981) and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”(1985) back from a three-decade drought with “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015). He doesn’t just reboot it, but gives it a paint job, flashy rims and some serious horsepower. “Mad Max: Fury Road” is somewhere between the apocalyptic grandiosity of a John Martin painting and a demolition derby, combining hell and spitfire diesel into a bad-ass rock and roll extravaganza.
The eponymous role of Max Rockatansky, formerly filled by Mel Gibson, is now played by the brawny Tom Hardy, who is enslaved to a post-apocalyptic society reminiscent of the Aztecs and a car-crazed Detroit. Their demigod and ruler, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), pillages the surrounding desert for gasoline with his massive band of dehydrated albino road warriors. During one voyage, his road queen Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) defects for her distant homeland along with Max, initiating the film’s two-hour chase odyssey.
Furiosa, as the name might suggest, is a crew-cut, bionic-armed, stone-cold killer cruiser who carries the matriarchy on her back in this phallocentric world of muscle, metal and misogyny. Like the Little Engine That Could fueled by fire and brimstone, her oil tanker has an iron will, as if casted by Vulcan himself, turning Joe’s armies into veritable junkyards. Beside her, Max is but a footnote, speaking in grunts and obeisant nods to her tempered mien. While Miller keeps the dialogue to a minimum anyway to let the epic battles do the talking, Theron and Hardy deliver controlled, lionhearted performances which ground the chaos. Miller may keep the title “Mad Max” to maintain a familiar face, but know this is Furiosa’s show.
Miller creates something like a NASCAR event with only the crashes, giving us hedonistic audiences the modern equivalent of a high-octane gladiator battle. The film never runs out of gas with Joe’s endless, Hydra-like army, while constantly refueling with some new roadblock or sidestreet littered with endless destruction. The hellish excess of Joe’s army is epitomized by its ringleader, a satanic, tongue-flailing guitarist who shreds visceral chords of war with his fire-spitting, double-neck guitar and monolithic speaker system. Kiss and Slash look like little schoolgirls in comparison. Whether it be some desert nomads or Furiosa’s feminist clan, someone’s always waiting to shift the film into some impossible level of overdrive.
Cinematographer John Seale avoids the traditionally bleak, desaturated apocalypse palette, opting for the lurid sensationalism of scorched oranges, sulfurous yellows and seething reds smeared over a canvas of caked, tar-like black. 3D is superfluous when the colors explode off the screen, with bodies and machines dismantling with furious momentum, throwing limbs and tires into the air like fireworks of celebratory carnage. What’s more, 80 percent of the effects — makeup and sets — are real to enhance the intense Namibian landscape where they filmed.
What sets “Mad Max” apart from other car-thrillers such as the “Fast and Furious” series is its, well, madness — it is lofted into a new mind-space of entropic, inhuman demolition, eschewing the sexiness and clean-cut, pithy sleekness of its counterparts. “Fast and Furious” is like hip-hop and meant to make you feel uncool, while “Fury Road” is like a hellish Mad Hatter’s tea party — everyone is welcome and deliciously insane. While it could be accused of being one-note in its relentless violence, it’s a damn good note, composed of the mellifluous sounds of burning rubber and burbling engines. So buckle up — or perhaps don’t — and enjoy the raw, eight-cylinder insanity.
Rating: 9/10
“Mad Max” is now playing at The Nugget in 2D at 4:15 p.m. and 6:40 p.m. and in 3D at 5 p.m. and 7:20 p.m.