An abundance of mindless action, and that's it

Rating: 4/10 (5 February 2017)

Ah! Fury Road! This movie was received with a lot of acclaim from both the critics and the general public and was hailed as the best movie of the year. And the thing this "masterpiece" does right is to drive across a desert and back using practical effects instead of CGI and have lots of explosions around. Apparently that's all it takes for a movie to be called great nowadays. Yeah, just show a real piece of sh*t on the floor instead of having it be a computer graphic and voila! It's no longer sh*t anymore! Sorry, but it takes a lot more than that to call a movie great, or even good, at least by my books. When I sit down to watch a movie people call 'good', the things I at least expect are a good story and characters (that's my main requisite). Aside from that, I expect to see some good acting, some nice ideas, variety in individual aspects(such as action/comedy, etc), or something different from the norm! Mad Max Fury Road has none of any of these things.
Now, I am willing to buy the excuse that this was a pure action film and things such as good story were not that important and what was more important was the action. The action was fine but there was nothing too amazing about it. It mostly consisted of blowing sh*t up thereby causing some big explosion here and there. A few guys come, attack with some guns,crash vehicles into each other, boom, and repeat. I'll give the film credit for it's use of practical effects and that definitely enhanced the experience but there was never much else for me to care about. Especially because the villains were mostly faceless moo-ks and the whole thing could have been over if they had just opened the oil tanker, put a lit matchstick inside it and run away.
Now I am normally okay with things such as plot conveniences as long as they are not overused and the characters reach some catharsis in the end or the story ends in a (at least) decent way. But, there was none of that in this entire movie. In fact, what threw me off was that they didn't even bother to introduce anything to us properly before rushing into the action. We are told that there is this guy called Max who was taken and there is this Joe guy who is a king of some sort and he mistreats his people (and yet has some incredibly loyal servants, never explained why) and then one of his soldiers kidnaps his...damsels in distress, I guess and then they all give chase to him with a huge amount of cars. All this happens in less than fifteen minutes and then they dive straight into the action.
I seriously wish that they had spent at least some time in fleshing out the setting or helping us get to know the characters and give them some personality, but all we know is that Max has a bad past, the soldier is rescuing those women and the Joe guy is evil just for the heck of it. Now I don't know about you but that is just not enough to get me to root for them. Even so when we know nothing about the damsels of distress (I didn't even know any of their names!). Another thing about them was that one could change their genders aside from the pregnant one and it wouldn't make a difference. And I'm talking about all characters, by the way.
Which leads me to this great theme of feminism everyone was talking about because Charlize Theron's character plays the soldier and she fights a lot and she is the actual main character (instead of Max who's just kinda there, I expected more from him given that the title contains the words Mad Max). She's the one who does most of the things and is like a leader figure and she's really praised for it. The problem? You can't think of her as a woman. She is stripped of everything that makes her a woman. I really don't see how any of that can be called feminism when you strip a woman of her femininity. Same goes for all women in the story.
So, if you don't dig the constant explosions that are happening every few minutes, you won't enjoy this movie and you'll probably be looking at the clock, wondering when this whole ordeal will end. The performances were alright, although nothing too noteworthy. The plot was basically a group of people being chased across a desert(that sums it up!). The characters were lifeless and forgettable. The themes are either a mess or are unexplored. There was very less effort placed into setting up the world or anything in it. Honestly, the only credit I can give this movie is for it's effects.
For all I care, Mad Max Fury Road is overrated garbage. I could keep going on about it's problems but I'll stop right here. I can't really say I hate it, but there is no way I can recommend this movie to anyone who wants more from a movie than mindless action.