Max’s equal in physicality, driving skills, and tortured past, the one-armed Furiosa stands at the forefront of a cast chockfull of imposing female characters that also includes “The Wives” - a quintet of young beauties including Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Zoë Kravitz - and a group of gun-toting, dirt-bike riding grannies who almost steal the show. Because, end of the world.Ĭharlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa is a high-ranking warlord of Immortan Joe’s, and she’s also arguably the main character of the film. He’s called Nux, and he doesn’t know what a tree is. Nicholas Hoult, previously spray-painted blue for the X-Men movies, is one such devotee. “I live, I die! I live again!” they scream as they inexplicably spray-paint their mouths chrome in their last moments before killing themselves in combat. Immortan Joe’s world is one where the steering wheel is a symbol of worship - and why shouldn’t it be when precious, precious gasoline is the lifeblood of these people? - and where the War Boys pledge their lives, and sacrificial deaths, to their leader. Joe is the monstrously scarred leader of a pasty-skinned cult of “War Boys,” and it’s here that the imaginative mix of Fury Road’s horror and beauty is truly first glimpsed. A chase begins almost immediately - a mere appetizer for the almost feature-length pursuit that makes up the guts of Fury Road - and results in Max being taken captive in the Citadel, the mountain headquarters of the ghastly Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also played the main bad guy in the very first Mad Max film back in 1979).
When we first meet Hardy’s Max, he’s seemingly stuck somewhere between The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome - still in command of his glorious, supercharged V8 from the former film, but also sporting the long locks of the latter. Is this a remake, a reboot, a sequel, or some mix of all three? Who can say, and it doesn’t really matter anyway the world painted here is reminiscent of the previous films in the series, but also next level, taking the evolution of the End of the World to its next logical, jarring, yet at times beautiful place. That ambiguous back story has always been a hallmark for director George Miller’s series, and it allows the filmmaker to reset Fury Road just a tad. Yes, Max Rockatansky is eternal, as is his plight in the freakish and horrifying Australian outback that exists in the wake of the vaguely defined global catastrophe that frames these films. Mel Gibson - long the standard-bearer of V8 Interceptors, dusty leather couture, and a haunted, tragic past - is gone, replaced by Tom Hardy in what has now become an ageless role. Not just in what passes for action franchise moviemaking today, but also in the world of the post-apocalyptic anti-hero himself. It’s been 30 years since we last saw Mad Max on the big screen, in the Road Warrior-lite Beyond Thunderdome, and a lot has changed since then. In the wasteland of Hollywood action movies - where over-the-top CGI slugfests, low-stakes drama, and disposable, interchangeable stock characters reign like some kind of masked mutant biker gang leader - Mad Max: Fury Road arrives like a gut-punch, a visceral return to the sort of R-rated genre pictures of yore that never underestimated their audience, nor took them for granted.
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