Cinemavenger

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Mad Max: Fury Road

In a post-apocalyptic world where gasoline is the most precious resource next to water, you'd think there'd be a lot more Priuses.  Or at least Corollas.  Sure, you'd still need some ginormous, 18-wheel death rigs and supersized, spike-covered dune buggies to keep up with the warlord next door, but for day-to-day runs to the bullet farm and such, wouldn't you want a bunch of 4-bangers that would get more than 10 miles to a gallon?

Apparently not.  Mad Max: Fury Road proves that you can't kill stupid.  Even tactical nukes can only irradiate and not eradicate it.  Big bad guy Immortan Joe's (Hugh "I Was In The Original Mad Max Back in 1979" Keays-Byrne) automotive armada consists entirely of 8-cylinder muscle cars, 16-cylinder trucks and an Enzo-Ferrari-only-knows-how-many-cylinders bandwagon featuring full-time kettle drummers and a heavy metal guitarist bungeed to the front.  Joe burns through gas like he owns more Exxon stock than the fucking Koch brothers. 

And when he's not wasting the second most valuable commodity left in the world, he's pissing away the first.  Just to show how big a dick he swings, from his Hefner-esque mountainside grotto - complete with supermodel wives and breast-milk dairy - Joe regularly sets off a man-made waterfall that dumps thousands of gallons of H2O onto the ground in front of his bedraggled followers below.

Supermodel wives?  Breast-milk dairy?  Yup.  Mad Max: Fury Road is crayer than a poophouse mouse.

At least Joe's got style.  Our hero, Max (Tom "Watch Me In Bronson Instead" Hardy), says about 50 words throughout the entire film, and he spends most of the first half of it with a metal mask clamped to his face while he's strapped to the front of one of Immortan Joe's petrol-guzzlers as an involuntary blood donor/human shield.  Oh, and his only character trait is that he has full blown, hallucinatory PTSD from the loss of his family at some point in the cloudy past.

He's more Sad Max than Mad Max.  More Road Worrier than Road Warrior.

Max reluctantly teams up with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize "Feminist Poster Babe" Theron) who has one arm and has stolen five of Joe's wives to help them escape a life filled with water, organic vegetables and relatively luxurious surroundings just so they can be free of a bit of sexual slavery.  And most likely die of thirst wandering the desert. 

Given her physical abnormality and her spousal banditry, that nobody even once calls Furiosa "Slot Machine" makes the comedy gods weep.

Mad Max: Fury Road is one long chase scene.  It's a short-bus kid smashing Hot Wheels in a sandbox - only the short-bus kid is the 70-year-old director of the original Mad Max series, the Hot Wheels are life-sized and the sandbox is Namibia.  It's a sensory tsunami of revving engines, screeching crashes and gunfire cranked to Spinal Tap's mythic 11.  It's end-to-end death, destruction and internal combustion chaos. 

Sounds like an action movie junkie's wet dream, right?  Well, I don't care how much you love anal or meth or eating ice cream; if you did nothing but that all day every day it'd get pretty fucking old pretty fucking fast.

May 17, 2015