A young enslaved Furiosa is caught up in a battle between two tyrants as
she tries to make her way home across the wasteland.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: George Miller
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemswoth, Alyla Browne, Tom
Burke, Nathan Jones, Angus Sampson, Quaden Bayles, Daniel Webber, Lachy
Hulme
The success of George Miller's first two
Mad Max movies gave rise to a wave of knockoffs in the early
'80s. Mostly Italian, these movies aped the post-punk petrolhead aesthetic
of Miller's films, with Mohawk-sporting warlords crashing dune buggies
into one another in the Spanish desert. While some of those movies were
fun and provided cheap thrills for an '80s audience eager to feed their
new VCRs, they lacked something. For a start they couldn't compete with
Miller's craft, but there was another key element missing: they weren't
Australian. The Aussie-ness of Miller's first two
Mad Max movies makes them all the more convincing. Someone
once described Australia as the Florida of the world, a country filled
with the sort of lunatics who could only thrive at the edge of
civilisation. While
Fury Road
saw Miller working at the top of his game, there was a geographical
ambiguity to that movie that made it feel distanced from the originals. It
certainly looked like a Mad Max movie and was filled with
the jaw-dropping action that is the franchise's trademark, but it felt a
little off in its distinct lack of boganity. You can imagine the movie's
Hollywood backers telling Miller to tone down the Aussie.
With Furiosa, his Fury Road prequel, Miller seems to have been given
more leeway, and it's the Aussiest film in the franchise since
The Road Warrior. It opens with a shot of planet Earth that rotates until the continent
of Australia fills the screen, at which point we zoom in and land in the
familiar desert terrain of the series' post-apocalyptic world. The first
words we hear are spoken in an almost impenetrably thick Aussie accent,
and we feel a warm glow of nostalgia. This is the Mad Max we
know. Despite Max Rockatansky being absent (or is he?), this is the most
Mad Max movie since The Road Warrior. This ain't Miller Lite, it's Miller XXXX.
As the title suggests, this movie is focussed not on Max but on Furiosa,
the one-armed warrior played so memorably by a shaven-headed Charlize
Theron in Fury Road. We're introduced to Furiosa as a child (played by Alyla Browne,
as impressive here as she was in the recent creature feature
Sting), kidnapped from her home in a verdant oasis and ending up the property
of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a warlord who models himself on the
emperors of ancient Rome, right down to riding a chariot into
battle.
A decade or so later Furiosa (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy) has
become the property of another warlord, Fury Road's Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and has shaved her head, pretending
to be a boy, not so she can play on the school soccer team but to avoid
becoming part of Joe's harem. Her skills see her team up with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), an ace big rig driver, and while
running errands across the wasteland she plots her revenge against
Dementus.
While the action in Fury Road was certainly spectacular, it
was also a tad monotonous. That movie was based around two extended
set-pieces which offered little variation, essentially chases in a
straight line. It was a bit like watching a Nascar race with no left
turns. The action in Furiosa offers a lot more diversity
while at the same time delivering the thrills and spills you expect from a
Mad Max movie. We're constantly reminded of the influence of
classic westerns on Miller's series, with post-apocalyptic retreads of
stagecoach attacks. In real life I have zero interest in cars/bikes/trucks
or anything on wheels, but for the duration of Furiosa I
became the world's biggest petrolhead. The constant rumbling of engines
makes you feel you're at a speedway event rather than a multiplex, and
there's an obsession with engines, pistons and chrome here that makes
Fast & Furious seem like a series about jogging in
comparison. Praetorian Jack's big rig is one of the all-time great movie
vehicles, a jacked up, rigged out cousin of James Bond's Aston Martin,
crushing everything in its path. Within broader set-pieces there are small
details that make you lean forward in your seat as you realise the scale
of what you're witnessing. Each sequence is filled with so much detail it
will require several rewatches to take it all in.
As the human figure at the centre of all this mechanised mayhem,
Taylor-Joy certainly looks the part but lacks Theron's steely charisma.
When Furiosa opens her mouth, which is rare, Taylor-Joy's accent is
incongruously polished for someone who has spent the last 10 years in the
company of white trash Aussies. I know she has to sound like Theron, but
giving Furiosa a bogan brogue would have made the character a lot more
convincing. Browne is so good as the younger Furiosa that you might wonder
if Miller should have paused shooting for a few years in order for her to
also portray the adult Furiosa. Burke is given little to do but look
rugged and brooding as the Max stand-in, but he does it well. The film is
stolen however by Hemsworth as Dementus. He's having the time of his life
playing an absolute wanker, and he seems to have drawn inspiration for his
performance from the infamous "succulent Chinese meal" bloke of online
fame.
The film's production design is similarly demented, with little details
like the mannequin torso on Dementus's motorbike that are so weird they
fit right into this insane world. You get the feeling Miller gave his team
free rein to come up with the craziest shit imaginable and they ran with
it. The only distraction is some unfortunate deployment of b-grade CG to
render backgrounds. The CG is so unconvincing that it takes you out of the
world for a moment and it's completely unnecessary, like those retouched
Star Trek blurays from the 2000s. But thankfully such
moments are few and far between as this is mostly a movie built around
practical effects and stunts, of men and motors, women and wheels, all
smashing into one another for our viewing pleasure. Miller, you mad
bastard, you've done it again.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is on
UK/ROI VOD now.
