Believe the hype

Rating: Null/10 (16 May 2015)

After hearing so much good feedback about this movie, I finally broke down and headed to my neighborhood theater to see it... though in the back of my mind I was thinking, "It can't be THAT good!" Well, it's been about an hour and half after walking out of the theater, and I'm still feeling blown away. The reports of the movie being almost non-stop action are true - it's basically one action sequence after another. Now, normally I would probably object to the fact that all this action doesn't leave much room for story or character development, but the action is top notch and filled with much variety, so my interest was always up. Also, in this age of CGI and quick edits, the action in this movie goes against the norm for the most part, using practical effects and more relaxed editing so that it's very easy to follow all the action.
However, I will admit that the movie is not perfect. Here are a few quibbles I had with the movie:
(1) A substantial amount of dialogue is hard to make out, due to a combination of thick accents and lots of background noise
(2) The Max Max character actually is up and center a lot less than you think. In the first half hour, he's mostly pushed to the sidelines. He does get more to do in the subsequent portion of the movie, but even then there's almost a feeling he's a supporting character and not a lead character.
(3) I did not understand the visions the Max Max character had several times of an unidentified female character. Who was he thinking of? It's not explained.
(4) The chief villain of the movie is not fleshed out enough, and the complaints I've read here from other IMDb users that he's more or less a clone of the villain in "The Road Warrior" do have some weight.
Despite those quibbles, I did enjoy the movie a lot. I will see it again when it's released on Blu-ray (though I will certainly turn the English captions option on first!)