Has any director ever returned to the franchise that made their name and had anything like the success of George Miller with Mad Max? George Lucas’s prequels to Star Wars sent many of the original trilogy’s fans to grief counselling, as if their childhoods had been robbed. Ridley Scott returned to invest his own Alien franchise with such mythopoeic afflatus you’d think he was shooting the Book of Deuteronomy. Even Spielberg messed up Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, thanks to a plot McGuffin so bad it should be studied for years to come. (As Indy might say, it belongs in a museum!)
But Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015 was more than just a tune-up. A gonzo, full-throttle demolition derby built on the original 1979 film’s B-movie chassis, but souped up to a state of such silvery, 24-cylinder magnificence as to become a Ben-Hur-style Oscar juggernaut, it was one of the greatest action spectacles ever committed to film — up there with Terminator 2, Die Hard, The Wild Bunch and Seven Samurai. Next-level film-making. It also introduced a new character, the skinhead hellcat Furiosa, who at the climax of Miller’s new sequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, is goaded by her nemesis, Dementus: “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” Well, punk, do you?
Organised into chapters — The Pole of Inaccessibility, Lesson from the Wasteland — the new film is a kind of petrochemical picaresque, following its heroine’s progress from childhood to adulthood, only with less in the way of secret billets-doux inviting her to commit indiscretions, and more in the way of sticks of dynamite tossed into her lap while she prangs a hotrod on the fender of her shiny chrome war rig. Kidnapped from the Green Place of Many Mothers, Furiosa sees her mother slaughtered by the preening warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). He raises her as his daughter, caged and muzzled, until she is pawned, as a spoil of war, to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the Vaderish bad guy with the flaxen hair from Fury Road who looked like a cross between a member of Iron Maiden and an iron lung.
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The film loses track of Furiosa somewhat while establishing the rivalry afoot between the two warlords. Furiosa is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, with a fearsome scowl accentuated by the black greasepaint across her forehead, being apprenticed by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who, impressed by her “purposeful savagery”, takes it upon himself to teach all he knows about road war — as luck would have it, just as war breaks out. Bring on the war rigs, and motorbikes ridden like chariots, three abreast, with Dementus at the reins. The film certainly reaches for epic, but does it top the astonishments of Fury Road? Not quite, with the sight of parascenders descending on Furiosa’s war rig unable to recapture the shock — and balletic grace — of those war boys arcing through the air on stakes in Fury Road, impaling Max’s rig like a porcupine.
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There is also the matter of Hemsworth, who when last we heard of him was complaining about the “silliness” of the Thor movies, but here, wearing a teddy bear strapped to his codpiece and a Clouseauesque fake nose, appears to have brought all the silliness with him. When are film-makers going to learn that comic villains are almost invariably a bad idea? We are reliably informed that everyone is “afraid of his crazy”, but no matter how much Hemsworth huffs and puffs as Dementus, he still comes across as the more thin-skinned kind of surfer dude. We are not afraid of his crazy, merely amused, which is not enough to sustain a two-and-a-half-hour revenge saga. We don’t hate him nearly enough.
And yet the film pulls through, largely because of its heroine, played with angular verve by Taylor-Joy, whose large, wide eyes seem lit up by some internal inferno, propelling Furiosa to centre stage, where she seemed to belong in Fury Road: nobody tell Germaine Greer, but the series’ transition into a feminist critique of greasy, gas-guzzling masculinity is complete. The Green Place of Many Mothers, from which Furiosa is kidnapped, is a verdant matriarchy, bedecked with Edenic fruit, while the names of two of Joe’s sons are Rictus and Scrotus — ho ho. The conflict between these two worlds, masculine and feminine, blood and milk, dust storm and fireball, seems the stuff of a modern-day myth. You can’t say that of many movies.
★★★★☆
George Miller, 15, 148min
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