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MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (Dir: George Miller, 2015).

Visit my blog JINGLE BONES MOVIE TIME to read a longer version of this review! Link below.

Tom Hardy takes the lead in this reboot of the popular post-apocalyptic Mad Max franchise.

Although a modestly budgeted Australian production, the original Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) was an enormous box office success and shot star Mel Gibson to international stardom. Mad Max: Fury Road is once again directed by the original series' co-writer and co-creator George Miller.

The movie opens in a futuristic post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by masked bad dude Immortan Joe (Hugh Keayes-Byrne). Captured by Joe's army and used as a 'bloodbag' by sickly soldier Nux (Brendan McCarthy), our hero Max soon finds himself adorning the hood of Nux's gasoline guzzling vehicle. Nux is in pursuit of Imperator Furiosa who is fleeing Joe with five of his wives in tow, one of whom is heavily pregnant. After some initial misunderstandings(!) Max and Furiosa soon team up to whoop Joe's ass. Which they do in spectacular fashion!

Mad is right; this movie is a bit bonkers! It is also nonstop adrenaline, with breathtaking action set pieces. The pace barely lets up for a second, and while occasionally confusing, it is never dull!

It is also visually stunning; from special effect sets to costumes to John Seale's exquisite cinematography Mad Max: Fury Road has to be one of the best looking blockbusters out there.

It is quite violent and occasionally grizzly. But the movie's overtly stylised and somewhat surreal atmosphere made the violent scenes much more palatable, even to a sensitive soul like me.

Tom Hardy is great in the lead, and makes for a surprisingly sympathetic Max. As the kick-butt Imperator Furiosa, Charlize Theron is Hardy's equal in the action stakes and, refreshingly, of equal importance to the narrative. This lends the movie a welcome feminist angle relatively rare in mainstream action films.

While I found the narrative in Fury Road a little confusing I was ultimately won over by its bonkers charm! Action movies as artistic as this are rare beasts; Mad Max: Fury Road is therefore recommended viewing, even for those who are not especially fond of the genre.

jinglebonesmovietime.blogspot.com

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road (Dir: George Miller, 2015) Tom Hardy takes the lead in this reboot of the popular post-apocalyptic Mad Max franc

The reviews are finally in! MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is an explosive, high-octane, runaway hit with a surprising yet refreshingly strong and welcome feminist message among film critics! Have no fear: this truly is a very LOVELY DAY!

"A relentless action spectacle that will dazzle audiences with its visceral torque and blazing vehicular madness... [George Miller] takes a traditionally testosterone-fueled series and reimagines it as a kind of feminist manifesto with much on its mind... 'Fury Road' might be the most intense and bruising action ride of the year, but the film also moves like a speeding maniac in possession of big and provocative ideas — ideas it scatters out the window while it’s moving at breakneck speeds... Come for the blistering, full-tilt action, stay for the thought-provoking consideration of the post-apocalypse... ‘Fury Road’ is ultimately a satisfying and ferocious piece of machinery; its batshit badassness should provoke primal screams of joy in even the most ardent and hardcore action purists."

— Rodrigo Perez @ The Playlist

"In a movie season exhaustingly cluttered with never-ending superhero sagas and reboots, ‘Fury Road’ arrives, despite its pedigree, as a daring, fascinating, thrilling jolt of original energy. It’s invigorating the way a big cinema spectacular should be, reveling in the medium’s towering possibilities, and transporting us to a thoroughly realized world that’s wholly unlike our own... We’re not talking about a particularly profound film here—survival is its chief big, blockish theme—but it is the rare mega-budget movie that has both heft and playfulness; it’s dark but fun, a churning orgy of sand and fire that pirouettes with balletic grace. It’s startlingly well-choreographed, impossibly nimble for all its heavy metal-and-bone construction... The film’s musculature is both lean and intricate, to supremely satisfying effect. It’s a crunching, grinding thing, ornate and ludicrous, that somehow still glides. ‘Fury Road’ is a bracing, nervy, weirdo adventure that more than lives up to its beautifully cut trailers. I doubt there will be a more rousing potential blockbuster released this summer. Go see it. It’s maddeningly good."

— Richard Lawson @ Vanity Fair

"In any other movie those women would be background noise, showing up just to be menaced/sexually assaulted. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ isn’t any other movie, and the Five Wives — Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton — each get their own character arcs and moments, and each react to their situation differently. Some fight, some cower, some want to return to the familiarity of their abuse, but all react as humans, not as plot devices. “We Are Not Things,” they write on the wall of their chamber before escaping. This is where the film’s surprising feminism shines through. Max isn’t the savior of these women, Furiosa is. It’s about women helping women, and Max is there as a (reluctant) ally. There’s a question that lingers over the whole film, “Who killed the world?,” and the answer, of course, is men. And they continue to grind it down ever further, and so Furiosa takes the women away in search of a Green Place, where a woman warrior group known as the Vulvani live. In the world of ‘Mad Max’, women can have traditional female qualities—they’re life givers, they’re caretakers—while also kicking copious amounts of ass and riding around on cool motorcycles."

— Devin Faraci @ Badass Digest

"We live in an era in which the word ‘awesome’ can be used to describe a fast food sandwich, so perhaps we have either become immune to hyperbole, or perhaps our standards are far too low. In either case, into this jaded epoch power-slides ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, a film that actively tries to be one of the greatest action movies ever made, and actually succeeds... Let that sink in. George Miller’s long-awaited fourth film in the ‘Mad Max’ series achieves what few action movies even dare to attempt: a nerve-jangling adrenaline freakout, packed to the gills with amazing (and real) stunt work, exciting characters, luxurious cinematography and manic detail... It’s smart and thoughtful but more than anything else, it is an experience that must be seen to be believed. No hyperbole, no joke: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ is the real deal, the kind of superlative action filmmaking that rips away at our collective acceptance of mediocrity. The bar has been raised, and it is the definition of awesome."

— William Bibbiani @ Crave Online

"’Mad Max: Fury Road’ may well be the “Götterdämerung” of drive-in movies. It has its roots in the Western and the post-apocalyptic road-rage action saga, but it also feels like an epic mic-drop, where Miller dares anyone else to follow in his tire treads.... If nothing else, this could be the movie that kills the blue-and-orange color scheme, if only because no one else is ever going to blue-and-orange as hard as ‘Fury Road’ does... Despite the testosterone on display here, it’s girl power that fuels a great deal of ‘Fury Road’, with some indelible moments provided by a talented ensemble of actresses both young and more experienced... Miller redefined action cinema with ‘The Road Warrior’, and it’s no stretch to suggest that ‘Fury Road’ ups the ante on what the genre might deliver in the future."

— Alonso Duralde @ The Wrap

"What compounds the fun is Fury Road’s wholesale rejection of the generally accepted blockbuster code of conduct, which dictates that expensive films have to be marketable to teenagers but still watchable by eight-year-olds in order to maximise box-office returns... Enormous, naked women are milked like cattle, dwarfs are hoisted on palanquins, and men as pale and gaunt as Méliès aliens are knocked out, gnawed on, sawn up and catapulted through explosions. Imagine if Cirque du Soleil reenacted a Hieronymus Bosch painting and someone set the theatre on fire. This is more or less what Miller has come up with... Few people, surely, were expecting robust feminism from the new ‘Mad Max’ film – yet here we are, and Theron’s character is far from the only instance of it. See also Immortan’s escaping wives, who may be young and sylphlike, but are the opposite of damsels in distress, and play an instrumental part in their own dash for freedom..."

— Robbie Collin @ The Daily Telegraph

"All these goofy, psychotic tribes outfitted like thrash-metal gladiators battling over the last dregs of petrol in jerry-built hot-rods. The brand name refers not only to its tortured hero — it is a statement of intent. And now, with $150 million-plus change at his disposal and the devil’s gleam in his eye, Miller has surely achieved maximum madness... Miller has put all the money, all the perverse and poetic flights of his imagination, on the screen. The scope is more operatic, the attitude still punk rock. It’s almost as if a petrol-head David Lynch has been given license to despoil the homogenised blueprint of the modern blockbuster. Racing into a gigantic, surreal sandstorm, the pursuit is assaulted by forks of lightning, tornadoes and scarlet fireballs, an echo of the nuclear holocaust that has left the world mad... ‘Fury Road’ is a defiantly, at times deliriously, cinematic experience. Utilising 3,500 storyboards, 480 hours of raw footage, multiple frame rates, handhelds, swooping cranes, crash zooms, a blithe disregard for the personal safety of a garrison of stuntmen and the tangible bulk of real metal being hurled about at ridiculous speeds, he has created a symphony of destruction. IMAX will melt your brain."

— Ian Nathan @ Empire Magazine

"Vastly more complex on a technical scale but simpler on a conceptual one, “Fury Road” is, for all intents and purposes, a two-hour car chase interrupted by a brief stretch of anxious downtime, and realized with the sort of deranged grandiosity that confirms Miller’s franchise has entered its decadent phase. All the more remarkable, then, that the movie still manages to retain its focus, achieving at once a shrewd distillation and a ferocious acceleration of its predecessors’ sensibility. There is gargantuan excess here, to be sure — and no shortage of madness — but there is also an astonishing level of discipline... The feminist undercurrents rippling through this movie are by turns sincere, calculated and teasingly tongue-in-cheek: Our first good glimpse of the Wives, clad in skimpy white rags and gathered around a water spout, plays like a vision out of “Girls Gone Wild: Coed Car Wash.” Even when they join in the fight, it can be hard to tell where erotic fantasy ends and empowerment fantasy begins, which is very much in keeping with the film’s unapologetically grindhouse attitude. Yet if “Fury Road” doesn’t deliver as pure a hit of girl-power retribution as say, Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” it’s hard not to respect the dramatic stature with which Miller elevates his female characters; Huntington-Whiteley and Kravitz, in particular, embody the sort of quiet defiance that ensures these women, though victimized, are never reduced to mere victims."

— Justin Chang @ Variety

"The first two [Mad Max] features ran barely 90 minutes, and it takes guts and real confidence to dare push a straight chase film with very little dialogue to two hours. But Miller has pulled it off by coming up with innumerable new elements to keep the action compelling: The pitiless mindset of a brutish-minded society; bending poles sticking up from vehicles that allow marauders atop them to by lowered into enemy trucks for hand-to-hand combat; an insane heavy metal guitarist affixed to one of the Citadel's rigs, whose raucous wailing and flame-throwing ability perfectly express this world's extremity; and a central woman, missing one arm, who's as tough-minded as any man but also retains a special link to a remote society of women she intends to find..."

— Todd McCarthy @ The Hollywood Reporter

"Extravagantly deranged, ear-splittingly cacophonous, and entirely over the top, George Miller has revived his ‘Mad Max’ punk-western franchise as a bizarre convoy chase action-thriller in the post-apocalyptic desert... It’s like ‘Grand Theft Auto’ revamped by Hieronymus Bosch, with a dab of Robert Rodríguez’s ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’... Dialogue is at a minimum, and when Max says anything it is usually preceded by an eccentric rumbling, mumbling mmmm sound, like a macho Mr. Bean. He is impassive, to say the least: the nearest Tom Hardy’s Max comes to an emotional outburst is when Splendid does something very brave while hanging on to the side of the truck. Max gives her a little smile and boyish thumbs-up. It’s the Mad Max equivalent of hugging her and declaiming: “Darling, your courage is magnificent.” And when Nux wishes to express defiance or euphoria, he sprays his mouth with silver-grey paint, to make his face look even more like a skull. That is pretty dysfunctional..."

— Peter Bradshaw @ The Guardian

"The first act of the film is where most of the money shots from the trailer come from, and we are clued in quickly to something rather shocking: Max isn’t the main character. Oh sure, he’s there in one form or another for the duration of the picture, but the primary action figure is Ms. Theron. Even when Max goes from a bystander to an aggressive participant, the focus remains on Theron’s would-be rescuer, and all of her charges are given agency and sympathy. You may have heard that George Miller brought in ‘Vagina Monologues’ author Eve Ensler to consult on the film and wow does it show. ‘Fury Road’ is not a film that just uses the notion of human sex slavery for topical seasoning and/or an excuse to show quivering young girls half-naked in shipping containers or cages. It is very much about the notion of a world that has ditched most of the remnants of so-called civilized society yet has kept the patriarchal system that keeps women under the thumb of arbitrarily designated male rulers and consigns them to be no more than (often unwilling) breeders. If you’ve read me for any length of time, you’ve heard me whine about the quantity and quality of female characters in mainstream motion pictures. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ is everything I say I want."

— Scott Mendelson @ Forbes

You can’t tell me this isn’t what you thought when you saw the fucking movie. My poor kohai War Boy just wanted his senpai Immortan to notice him LOL.

"[Immortan Joe] is somebody who would chop heads for not accepting that he was a god... I have a breeding program, I have blood banks, I have milk banks, I have hydroponics—anything to keep his power... [And the War Boys] would die for me, because the Immortan was God; the Immortan had chosen to come back to Earth and be with you and suffer with you..."

— Hugh Keays-Byrne on his role as the Immortan Joe in "Mad Max: Fury Road" (x)

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

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So Mad Max: Fury Road and Snowpiercer are basically complementary post-apocalyptic films that share a lot of socio-political themes and complex characters. Don't believe me? Well...

There's the totally badass chief protagonist without a left forearm who wants to defeat the antagonist ruling over the oppressed (Curtis Everett and Imperator Furiosa).

There's the taciturn secondary protagonist who is also great but really lets the chief protagonist do all the cool shit (Max Rockatansky and Namgoong Minsoo).

There's the brutal antagonist who abuses a position of power to control the lower class and not to mention having a really hideous set of false teeth (Minister Mason and Immortan Joe).

There's the gung-ho and eager-to-please adorable younger sidekick who ends up dying for a good cause (Nux and Edgar).

There's also the supporting female character who's never portrayed in a sexualized manner, and who's a bit weird and eccentric and has a heightened sense of awareness that allows her to see things before other people (Yona Minsoo and The Dag).

The Splendid Angharad and Capable be like...