Welcome back, Max.

Rating: 9/10 (14 May 2015)

It's been thirty years since I left the cinema feeling more than a little let down by the kiddie friendly, Hollywood-ised action of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome; could this long-awaited reboot from the series' original creator George Miller make up for three decades of disappointment? You betcha!
One certainly can't accuse Miller of playing it safe with his fourth Mad Max outing: Fury Road is an exercise in absolute excess from start to finish. The outrageous plot opens with Max (Tom Hardy, taking over the iconic role from Mad Mel) being captured by a clan of desert warriors ruled over by ruthless tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, Toecutter from the original Mad Max), who keeps order in his citadel by controlling its supply of water (and breast milk!). The helpless Max is used as a 'blood bank' by sickly war-boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult), before finding himself strapped to the front of Nux's vehicle, part of the huge convoy that takes off in pursuit after rebellious one-armed rig-driver Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who has betrayed Joe by making off with several of his wives, having promised to escort them to a promised land of green.
After the chase enters a massive electrical sandstorm, during which Nux crashes his car, Max finds himself free once again; teaming up with Furiosa, he helps to drive the rig to safety, but on reaching their destination, Max and Furiosa realise that their only hope for survival is to turn back and face the enemy head on. Up to this point, the action had been impressive, but what follows is absolutely breath-taking—a mind-boggling mêlée of sheer madness and mayhem, with more mashed metal and massive explosions than all three previous Mad Max films put together, times ten. Quite how Miller managed to capture some of the scenes of car-nage without killing anyone in the process is hard to imagine, such is the incredible level of vehicular destruction on display.
The previous Mad Max movies—even Thunderdome—excelled when it came to production design, and Fury Road is the most imaginative yet, with its wonderful citadel full of man-powered machinery, and, of course, its cavalcade of absurd post-apocalyptic vehicles (love, love, love the The Cars That Ate Paris-inspired buggies covered in metal spikes). The attention to detail here is superb, with far too much to take in in just one viewing (I've only just finished watching it and I already want to see it again). The insane characters also go a long way to making this film the hugely entertaining experience that it is: Slit, a war-boy with a Joker-style smile; Rictus Erectus, the dim musclebound son of Immortan Joe; The Doof Warrior, a guitar playing gimp stood astride a bank of loudspeakers on wheels; and a strange deformed dwarf, another of Joe's sons, who watches the world through a telescope from the safety of the citadel.
Finally, the 3D: usually, I can take or leave the gimmick of a third dimension, but here it really added to my enjoyment, Miller milking the process for all its worth. I suggest watching Fury Road in 3D if only for the shot of the steering wheel flying into the foreground: I felt like I could reach out and catch it—a lasting souvenir from one of the most spectacular movies of the millennium so far.