Quik Flix Hit

Summer Movie Series

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Rated R

Warner Bros. Pictures

Mad Max: Fury Road is told almost entirely in terms of action. It’s an extended chase from Point A to Point B and then back. That director George Miller elevates this chase to visual, sonic and kinetic elegance proves that you can turn nearly any story into a great film if you know what you’re doing.

How many car chases have we witnessed in action films? At this point, what can be done to distinguish a good car chase from all others? I’d say distinctive style, which Miller has in spades, harkening all the way back to 1979’s Mad Max.

The character Max Rockantansky has been reimagined for a new generation. Tom Hardy is even less chatty than Mel Gibson’s iconic version, who had three films of his own. We meet this new Max as he’s eating a live lizard and repairing his supped up ’73 Ford Falcon “Interceptor,” a holdover from the original film. We know he’s lost his family because of the fleeting images that haunt him. And while he’s ostensibly the hero, the film’s about Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa (get used to names like that, the film’s loaded with them). Her haunted eyes, prosthetic left arm and branded neck tell us she’s endured things beyond belief. In a post-apocalyptic world we’ve known from the previous films, Furiosa lives in one corner, The Citadel, ruled by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) who uses women as chattel (for milk, pleasure and breeding), while hoarding a water supply from the dusty, dirty masses. He’s supported by his War Boys henchmen, also dusty and dirty but better fed and given vehicles.

Furiosa takes a stand and escapes with Joe’s five wives, two of whom are pregnant. Hiding the women within a tanker, Furiosa turns a supposed fuel run into an escape agenda to her homeland—and the chase is on. During the run she crosses paths with Max and Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of Joe’s cancer-addled War Boys.

The rest is Miller magic. The post-apocalypse has never looked so bleak yet wonderful. Miller reminds us he’s a visionary. Masterful, whether he’s packing the frame with visual puns and throwaway imagery or dazzling with beautiful wide-angle vistas. One haunting scene shows humans lumbering on stilts across a dried-out, poisoned landscape like giraffes on a bombed-out Africa veldt. And the colors! They explode from flames and flair-gun tendrils and blowing sand and dust from cascading rocks. The chase takes us through canyons, across sinking fields, along bone-dry wastelands, past a grassy oasis and into impossible sand storms.

To say nothing of the people inhabiting this world: wiry and muscled, sun-blasted and chalked-up, mutated post-nuke hellions and soft-skinned beauties. The inhabitants are scarred with brandings and tumors and tattoos, and festooned with tribal paint, leather and furs.

Miller’s vision extends to the vehicles, which are basically characters themselves. We have motorcycles and tractor trailers, customized dune buggies and sedans and retrofitted trucks with cranes and scoops, and double-decker wagons. Machinery is fetishized with artifacts and spot welded into hybrid monstrosities, adorned with banners and long flexible poles that support swaying War Boys; even moving scaffolding support huge bass drums that set the pace, and a heavy-metal guitarist whose riffs spew dragon-fire.

Water, food and foliage may be scarce, but not gasoline. These big-wheeled vehicles boom and zoom through vast desert and salt flats with abandon, heedless of fuel or repair needs.

Forget over-the-top, this film is custom made to rev us up and beyond, around, underneath and through its chase-plot by any means necessary.

Any character development we get is through sorrowful gazes or crazed expressions or primal screams or knowing grunts; Miller’s a pro at this. Amid the chaos he knits in his themes: vengeance, solidarity and finally redemption. I remember again his skill at sketching dozens of characters—and vehicles—from corky traits, blunt visuals, and above all, action.

This movie totally succeeds in its agenda. It’s action-packed, visual astounding, simply plotted and completely contained. Every moment works.

| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive