Movie review: Raging back to the Mad Max future

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This article was published 24/05/2024 (670 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Violent, grotesque and grimly funny, George Miller’s post-apocalyptic action prequel focuses on the titular Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), the implacable driver played by Charlize Theron in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. While the vehicle-centric narrative (from Miller and Nick Lathouris) occasionally stalls, this latest addition to the 45-year-old series still manages to feel idiosyncratic, original and fresh.

The story, which spans 15 years, is told in chapters. We start with Furiosa as a lethally competent child (the character is initially played by young Alyla Browne). She lives with her mother (Charlee Fraser) in the Green Place, a small hidden oasis of abundance. (In the Mad Max universe, that means water, plants and feminist self-determination.)

After Furiosa is seized by marauders, she is taken into the kill-or-be-killed desert desolation of the Wasteland, where she will be caught between the conniving, competing warlords who run Bullet City, Gastown and the Citadel.

Child actor Browne is not only good but also convincingly Anya Taylor-Joy-like. Still, it takes one hour to meet Taylor-Joy herself. Known for Emma, The Queen’s Gambit and The Witch, Taylor-Joy has almost no dialogue — she has said she filmed for months without saying a word — and this very physical performance benefits from her coiled, convincingly tough body language and wary, wide-eyed, slightly unearthly gaze.

Immortan Joe (now played by Lachy Hulme) was the main enemy in Fury Road, and while he’s still plenty horrible, he’s been edged out as primary antagonist by Chris Hemsworth’s Dr. Dementus.

With most blockbuster movies plagued by uninteresting, interchangeable villains, Dementus stands out as a disconcertingly cheerful sadist with an offbeat, word-a-day-calendar vocabulary.

Hemsworth, almost unrecognizable under a prosthetic nose and a beard that goes grey over the course of 15 years, has made the intriguing decision to play him scary but also a bit annoying. In this notably dialogue-light movie, Dementus just goes on and on.

In her mostly solitary and silent saga of survival, escape and revenge, Furiosa does find an ally in Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). He drives the Citadel’s War Rig — a massive, fiendishly modified tanker truck— and remains hilariously imperturbable under attack.

Jack takes to Furiosa, complimenting her on her “purposeful savagery.” (That’s about as close as the Mad Max world gets to flirting.)

The central set-pieces of the film are once again spectacular chases across endless red-dust roads and vast expanses of desert, involving a motley collection of motorized chariots, hang gliders, motorbikes, hopped-up VW vans and old Chevies.

The 2015 flick was unusually pure in its use of practical effects and death-defying stunt work rather than CGI, and while Miller uses more digital tricks here, the action sequences still feel grounded, non-generic and even surprising.

They can also be strangely funny. The extended chase in the middle of the movie is violent and vicious, with an unbelievably high body count, but it still pulls off moments of silent-film slapstick comedy.

That gallows humour is picked up by the film’s darkly absurdist ideas about bare-bones scarcity and tragically stupid consumption. The Citadel sends Jack and the War Rig out on dangerous road trips to Gastown and Bullet City to procure, well, gas and bullets. But the main reason the Citadel powers need gas and bullets seems to be so they can keep making these dangerous road trips.

In comparison to the hyper-focused Fury Road, which basically came down to the main characters chasing or being chased across the desert, Furiosa often feels decentred and spread out, with a frustratingly long build-up followed by a rushed and chopped-up ending.

But for all that, Miller’s obsessive world-building manages to hold things together. The stunningly beautiful sweeps of the limitless landscape are juxtaposed with the weird little details of its wretched human inhabitants.

There’s one baddie who loves Pre-Raphaelite painting and another who has specially cut holes in his suit vest so he can caress his nipples while he talks. There’s a History Man who’s like a walking book, his skin and clothing covered in tattooed information. There are the underground dwellers subsisting on maggot mash and roach rations. There’s an endless, eager supply of scrappy, skinny War Boys, so much fodder for those War Rig trips.

There are elaborate and ingenious kinds of human cruelty — though, thankfully, the worst excesses are implied rather than shown.

And finally, amid a conclusion that decries the waste of war and the futility of revenge, Miller and Taylor-Joy offer some (very slight) glints of hope that take us to the beginning of Fury Road, retroactively supplying that story with more emotional layers.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com