Prospero | New film: Mad Max: Fury Road

Madder, badder and more dangerous to know

George Miller's revival of Mad Max is an action-riddled triumph

By K.S.C.

EACH age gets the road-dwelling delinquents it deserves. For the good folk of the 1950s it was Johnny Strabler, hero of “The Wild One”, and a supporting crew who wore leather and drank too much beer. When the first slew of “Mad Max” films came out, between 1979 and 1985, Rod Stewart, Madonna and the Village People were in the charts. So its bad young things liked their hair big, their vehicles dishevelled and their chaps buttock-baring. Rather than an absence of family structure, what drove them was a limited supply of fossil fuels and widespread societal breakdown.

Thirty years later, George Miller, the Australian director of the original trilogy, was persuaded away from films about tap-dancing penguins to revive the brand. In “Fury Road” he has given us villains for the Justin Bieber generation, and they are a very peculiar bunch indeed.

This is neither sequel nor prequel, but an impressionistic reimagining. Many elements of the originals remain—the post-apocalyptic world scrapping over the remaining natural resources, the Frankenstein’s-monster cars and bikes, the chases and smash-ups—but they have been drastically souped up. The result is a film that screeches along at the pace of a music video. It opens just as Max (played, this time, by Tom Hardy) is captured and dragged back to the Citadel, one of the few remaining outposts of humanity. Its diseased populace are ruled over by Immortan Joe, a war-mongering despot who restricts access to water, keeps one harem of beautiful women to bear his brood and another of breast-feeding mothers to supply him with milk, and enjoys god-like status among an army of young men who rush to die in his service in order to reach a blissful afterlife.

A saviour arrives in the form of Imperator Furiosa, one of Joe’s de facto generals and a trusted war-rig driver, who is planning to help the warlord’s unwilling brides escape from the Citadel. Though the presence of a strong female lead has ruffled some more reactionary feathers, Charlize Theron’s Furiosa is brilliant as the film’s fearsome centre of gravity, commanding the screen and dominating the fight scenes. Max, who was the unrivalled principal in the previous films, is surprisingly good at sharing the screen. This is partly because he spends much of the movie saying nothing, and what he does utter comes out in a voice rather like the unintelligible rumble Mr Hardy brought to Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises”. "Each of us in our own way was broken," he rasps. "It was hard to know who was more crazy: me or everyone else." And it is partly because, having started the film as a frenetic ball of survival instinct, he only blossoms into something recognisably human—and comes into his own—at around the hour mark.

With “Fury Road” Mr Miller has concocted a gem of an action film. There are enough sly backward nods to reward the fidelity of geeks of the Mel Gibson era. (The music box Max gave the feral boy in film two reappears, for example, and Mr Miller has shrewdly re-engaged Hugh Keays-Byrne, the bear-headed, glittering-eyed actor who played Toecutter in film one as his Immortan Joe.) But this is a grander, bigger-budgeted affair with an array of tricks to keep new fans happy. Production values are sky-high: the list of stunt doubles, make-up artists and visual-effect techs is staggering. (The sole job of one crew member was to look after skulls and wheels; he will have been kept very busy.) With its off-kilter dialogue, memorable anti-heroes and set-piece car chases that make “Fast and Furious” films look like road-safety ads, “Mad Max: Fury Road” has certainly raised the action-film bar and will have fans clamouring for a fifth instalment.

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