Fury Road...a review

So, I just got to watching “Mad Max, Fury Road” and I thought I would give it review.  First, I must start by saying that I have no idea what goes into rating a movie but the R rating on this one just seems off.  I use “I am Legend” as a guide to what can be in a PG-13 and it is way worse than anything in Mad Max.

Let me start by saying that the movie is every bit as visually stunning as you may have heard.  The scenes are vivid to the point of jumping off the screen.  Writer/Director George Miller said that he did not want another dark post apocalypse movie and that is defiantly not was he has given us.  The actor’s wardrobe and mark-up are well worth all the accolades they received.  Without the physical darkness of the setting, the look of the actors themselves provides the visual cue for the desperate, mutated land that the film is set.  All of that said, the stars of the movie are without a doubt the menacing machines that are the center of what story there is.  While accepting that they were not “real” the level of engineering and artistic work that went into the development of the caravan of vehicles in nothing short of remarkable.  Part steampunk and part mechanized cirque de sola you expect them to come roaring off the screen in a flurry of unimaginable ways but… this is also where I began to feel that the film could not live up to its ambitions.  There are a few of the chase scenes where the hoard of vehicles seems alive in as they hunt down their prey but then invariably, the actual clashes become one on one interactions where you realize that much of the fearsome mechanics are little more than show.  Max and Furiosa’s “War Machine” is scary visually but lacks any depth to think that it was something to fear.  It was big, dark and spikey but ended just being a truck with knobby tires.  The fight scenes are quick flashy but also in a straight line and devoid of any real tension.  For a movie that spends 75% of its screen time in some sort of chase scene, they just never seem to live up to their apocalyptic billing.  Now, in Miller’s defense, some of the letdown really is a testament to the props they built.  There was so much there we were expecting to be involved in the action that, when it wasn’t, it was a letdown.

Now I am not one that must have epic amounts of character development and dialog for a movie to be great.  The original “Road Warrior” was a perfect example of that.  Very little dialog throughout along with a thin story yet a great movie with a depth of character in Max that others would not have been able to create with four times the lines.  But as great as the original was in using a sparse outline to weave a convincing, engrossing tail, this film doesn’t even try.  Tom Hardy in his reprisal of Max is left to lean on the character that was created in the past films rather than given any opportunity to make it his own.  You know he is Max, you know he is troubled and you know he isn’t real talkative but that’s it.  There is nothing there.  Now again, as this is the latest in the series maybe we shouldn’t expect the same level of development but there needs to be something more than none.  Which is all you get.  Even the few lines that Hardy does get are delivered in short low mumbling busts that are more akin of “Rainman” that that of the angry, troubled Max that we are lead to believe he is.  Fact is, without “Mad Max” in the title and some of the visual cues you would never really know that this is the latest in a series.  Theron’s “Furiosa” is not quite as thin but close.  She is so good at delivering a role in a way that seems that there is more going on with her character than she lets you see.  That complexity of delivery almost gets her by but we are never given a reason to care about her quest so I found myself simply not.

Overall the film is stunning eye-candy and I would be remiss as well if I didn’t give credit to Junkie XL for the original score with was simply as good as it gets.  Those elements alone are reason enough to go see it (and frankly are so good as to almost make you overlook the shortcomings.)  In the end, however, the shortcomings are too fundamental and egregious to overlook.  The lack of real story or any depth of characters leave us with something that feels like a shell of what it could have been.  I am always skeptical of films that land right at round numbers for length.  It has been reported that there were days worth of film that they needed to edit down to get to the final product.  My sense is that they may have edited too much.  

All in, a alright movie not great and, dare I say, a little overrated.