I am in awe...not of the movie but of the reviews..

Rating: 2/10 (17 May 2015)

I went to this movie with my daughter, 15, and we both walked out of there convinced this is one of the worse movies we'd seen in years. Save your money and go see anything else...
Given the disparity of years, culture, values, etc. it is a bit surprising that one of us didn't like this movie, even just a little. In fact, the only reason this doesn't get a zero stars is that, well, there is no zeros available and some of the cars were kinda cool. Everything else, the crappy predicable acting, the crappy predictable storyline, the crappy predictable and sophmoronic writing, was crappy, predictable, and sometimes sophmoronic (yes, I did just make that word up). This is a movie that suffered from too much money (140 million budget I read elsewhere, they must have used it on the cars) too much ambition (I also read that one of the ambitions was to make it more feminist a la the Vagina Dialogues writer(s)) and too little imagination. Halfway through I started rooting for the bad guys as they seemed the only hope for ending this thing.
So the problem this film had was mundaneness. I didn't think Hardy's character was heroic or very interesting so I didn't care much about his fate. I thought Theron's character was supposed to be dark except that she only seemed to be broken, maybe as much as Hardy's. This left the movie without a real lead, which is OK if there is an ensemble cast with multiple story lines...but this wasn't that, it was just one long car chase into the dessert and then turn around and go back. Making the bad guys a bunch of weak suicidal wannabe Vikings didn't add a lot dimension to the plot either. And turning their leaders into caricatures might have appealed to the anti-tough crowd that likes to make tough guys kinda clownish and seriously flawed but it didn't help the storyline much. Oh wait, what storyline?
So if you have extra money that you want to donate to an unworthy cause, buy a ticket and send a message that this is good enough to pay for. If your AC is out and you need a cool place to hide and this is the only thing playing, spend a couple of hours in the back where you can catch a few zzzzzzzzs. The Avengers show was so full that we couldn't find two seats together so we went to this instead where there was plenty of room. That makes it our fault for not getting to the theatre earlier and lesson learned. Nobody should go through that kind of thing twice.