A Max-less Mad Max

There was a Jason Bourne movie with no Jason Bourne (The Bourne Legacy), and now we have a Mad Max movie with no Mad Max. This one is titled Furiosa and is billed as “A Mad Max Saga.” It is...

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There was a Jason Bourne movie with no Jason Bourne (The Bourne Legacy), and now we have a Mad Max movie with no Mad Max.

This one is titled Furiosa and is billed as “A Mad Max Saga.” It is replete with the requisite explosions and lengthy chase scenes one comes to expect in a Mad Max movie, but still, the movie could have used a heavy dose of the franchise’s eponymous hero, Mr. Rockatansky, if only for honesty’s sake.

Furiosa, of course, was the hero, or co-hero with a Tom Hardy Max, in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, a two-hour car chase masquerading as a movie that was nominated for 10 Oscars (winning six) and is generally acclaimed by critics as one of the great action movies of our time.

This one received similar, albeit occasionally muted, accolades from the pundit class. Robert Daniels at Roger Ebert.com called it “simply one of the best prequels ever made.” Other reviewers wagged their chins at its thematic complexity, at its more engaged dialogue and character building. One said director George Miller may have been aiming at a larger message — “that men destroy and women renew.”

The moviegoing public, though, didn’t catch the spirit. Opening weekend sales figures were staggeringly low. Furiosa claims the worst Memorial Day opening weekend in 40 years.

How bad was it? John Nolte at Breitbart lays out what the movie had going for it:

The prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road earned great reviews, opened on the perfect weekend for a blockbuster, and with no competition in its action lane. What’s more, it’s based on a successful franchise and Warner’s promoted the living hell out of it.

And yet, it went down in flames as though struck by a volley of thundersticks.

The movie cost $168 million to make but garnered a mere $32 million at the box office over the four-day weekend. It narrowly (“by a hair,” as the AP put it) captured the weekend over (wait for it) Garfield. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Trouble in the Picklesphere)

That’s what happens when you take a popular, blowout successful franchise and turn it over to the diversity police. Hollywood should know this by now — after what wokeness did to the Ghostbusters, Terminator, and Men in Black franchises; the Charlie’s Angels remake of 2019; and the last couple of James Bond movies with the newly neutered 007.

But that isn’t to absolve the movie of its other transgressions.

Furiosa on Its Own Merits

Mad Max without Max begins with young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) picking peaches in an incongruously verdant spot on the stark and desiccated postapocalyptic landscape called the Green Place of Many Mothers. She’s kidnapped by followers of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), long-haired leader of the Biker Horde, and dragged off. Her mother chases after to rescue her but is herself captured and executed before young Furiosa’s eyes.

This sets up the rest of the story: Furiosa’s vengeance campaign against Dementus. The Biker Horde captures Gas Town, setting up a parlay with Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the white-mained ruler of the Citadel familiar from Fury Road. Dementus turns Gas Town over to Joe for water and food, and he throws in Furiosa as a lagniappe. She is destined to join the concubines Immortan Joe keeps to breed male offspring known in Fury Road as “the Wives.”

But Furiosa retreats into anonymity under Immortan Joe, passing herself off as one the demented leader’s War Boys, until we find her on a war rig fighting for control of the Bullet Farm. Numerous other chases and battles ensue until finally Furiosa has Dementus at her mercy, and her vengeance is satisfied.

The movie ends with Furiosa secreting the Wives into the bowels of a war rig as she readies to set off from the Citadel for Gas Town (and freedom) and the start of Fury Road. 

The best chase scene in Furiosa comes in the middle of the movie — not a good sign in an action movie — when a two-section tanker, shining in the sun, with a deadly makeshift whirring blade dangling from behind, barrels down the blacktop under attack from a horde of marauders on bikes hurling thundersticks and paragliders tossing bombs from above. Also, the last 30 minutes are a total anticlimax, regardless of how big the chases or explosions leading up to it or how dramatic and moving the coup de grace, because you know Furiosa makes it through because she has to star in Fury Road, which has been out for nine years.

The movie belongs to Anya Taylor-Joy, the adult Furiosa. Everybody talked about the power and expressiveness of her wide-set eyes, which may be true enough, but she’s 5 feet 8 inches and a little on the lean side. Charlize Theron, at least, is a 6-footer with believable aggression — she and Hardy have a good, credible tussle when first meeting at the war rig in Fury Road. Its hard to see Taylor-Joy carrying Theron’s measure of heft. Thankfully, she doesn’t beat up a roomful of buff guys at any point, but she throws a punch here and there and ends the movie pounding Hemsworth for a good two or three minutes, although he is at a disadvantage, to be fair, by having his hands shackled behind his back. (READ MORE: A Confusing and Ambiguous Civil War)

The movie does feature some fun stuff. Dementus wears a cape and straps a teddy bear amulet to his outfit and rides around in a chariot pulled by three motorcycles and is accompanied by the “History Man,” a grizzled figure who provides historical, or ahistorical, commentary. And we get to see up close what we were only distantly shown in Fury Road, that is, Gas Town and the Bullet Farm. We also see the Green Place of Many Mothers when it was still green, and even the Australian outback again, like in the first three Mad Max movies (Fury Road was filmed in Namibia). And some characters from Fury Road show up as well: younger versions of Immortan Joe and the People-Eater and the Bullet Farmer. Like Fury Road, there’s no foul language in this one that I could hear, and no sex, although Immortan Joe gave his kids interesting names — Rictus Erectus and Scrotus.

The movie lacked the extemporaneity of the four other films. A lot of the ancillary items — the decorations, the throwaway detritus — take on less of an ad hoc nature in Furiosa. They don’t seem like the artifacts of a destroyed world reclaimed for their necessity, like football helmets and shoulder pads worn for their utility; they seem designed, clever, branded, camp — like they were placed in the movie to look cool on purpose.

Furiosa lacks the straightforward, uncomplicated, thoughtless, linear fun of Fury Road. Charlize Theron was a co-hero in that flick, but Tom Hardy (as Max Rockatansky) was in the war rig with her the whole way. It was a great movie where good guys were chased by bad guys — out and back. Two hours went by like two minutes.

Furiosa lacked all that. There is a good girl pursued by two bad guys, neither of which is mean enough to gain dominance of the screen in a story that leaves you wondering at many places why what is going on is going on.

And it lacked one other thing: Max Rockatansky.

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