Mad Max Fury Road Review: On the road again

Max stuck in a rather precarious situation in Mad Max Fury Road

Photo Credit: Warner Brothers Pictures

Mad Max Fury Road

A+

A review by Frederick Cholowski

A lot has changed since the last time that George Miller visited the Mad Max franchise. The summer action blockbuster has seen the rise of the superhero and along with it a new formula. Now to make a successful action film you need to have a grand backstory, quippy dialogue, and a giant battle that will determine the fate of the world (or at least one major Metropolitan city).  Mad Max Fury Road takes that formula, throws it out the window, flips it off, and then runs over it with a monster truck. The film dares to be different and in doing so creates a fascinating masterwork of an action film that speaks almost entirely in images.

Mad Max’s plot plays out almost entirely in a giant action sequence. It involves the return of Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) who is found in quite the precarious situation after being kidnapped by the evil warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keayns-Byrne). All hell breaks loose when one of Joe’s best warriors Impeator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) kidnaps all of his many wives and makes off to try and gain a better live for the tortured women. This initiates a giant car chase between Joe, his giant army, and Furiosa, with Max unwillingly thrown into the fray as a “blood bag” for the sick members of Joe’s legion.

The most marvelous part of Fury road is the extensive use of visual storytelling. The film never feels a need for long scenes of exposition and instead instead works almost all of its world building and character development into the images on the screen. Characters in this film do not speak often, instead Miller uses a mix of facial cues and short visual flashbacks in order to convey the characters’ emotions and backstory. All of the world building is achieved in almost the same way and it helps that Miller has created a world that is so wickedly wacky, that images don’t just stick in the brain they are permanently burned in. For example Immortan Joe’s army features a giant car that features a single blind guitarist and stacks upon stacks of amplifiers whose only job is to hype up his crew. It’s such a breath of fresh air from the dialogue and exposition heavy action films of 2015, and it works on a near perfect level to create an experience that is unforgettable.

It also helps that the pacing of the film is practically perfect. As mentioned earlier most of Fury Road is just one giant action sequence that builds upon itself with layers upon layers of complexity and wackiness. What this achieves is a white knuckle race that so perfectly fits this kind of visual oriented picture. I could count the amount of breaths I took throughout the film and its two hour running time is gone in what felt like mere seconds. In other words there is no wasted frame in Fury Road, and only about a 15 minute pause from the action throughout its entire two hours. It really creates and exhilarating experience and one of the most perfectly designed action film not only of recent memory but perhaps ever.

There is little in the way of virtuoso performances in Fury Road but at the same time, the few prominent performances are in their own way quite extraordinary. Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in particular have to use a lot of facial expressions to display almost the entirety of their characters. Both actors make it look easy and expression exchanges between the two as well as between them and the many wives of Joe are a marvel just to watch on their own. Never has the old cliché of a picture is worth a thousand words applied more, the visuals of this film achieve a striking story that no dialogue could tell and that is clearly reflected throughout the films' performances.

But no matter how good everything else is if the action does not deliver then the film itself will not; gladly that is a non-issue in Fury Road. The action sequences (or really sequence) are all exhilarating and perfectly executed. They all play out in perfectly building layers, and each little meta sequence progresses and becomes more intense and more wacky as it goes on. Everything is also shot very coherently; never did I, never in the moments where what seem like a million little things are going on at the same time did I lose track of what the main focus of an action scene was and where and what are main players are doing in particular scenes. The film also works surprisingly well in 3D. This is one of the few films where I never noticed the glasses for its entirety and I felt as though some of the wackier portions of the action sequences actually benefited from the foreground, background contrast that 3D in its best can provide.

Mad Max in all is one for the best and most unique action films I have ever seen. Perfectly paced and beautifully composed, the film is not only an exhilarating masterwork on its own but provides a nice contrast to the same old same old feel that can dominate many modern superhero driven action films. If you can see only one summer blockbuster in 2015 make it Mad Max Fury Road.