Max rocks.

Rating: 8/10 (17 May 2015)

The latest Mad Max is a frenzied, endless race of souped-up, well-armed vehicles across a whole lot of sand. The relentless pace makes for a wildly exciting film for which the plot is superfluous and generally unnecessary. There is much mayhem and madness. It is quite good.
This is perhaps the best pure action movie you'll see this year; even The Avengers and Star Wars have a fully developed story to get in the way. This one is a shot of pure adrenaline that never lets up. Here, the titular antihero has been captured by one of those omnipresent roving biker gangs I expect we'll all see in the near future. Max is turned over to a slaver/warlord named Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who controls water and food for everyone in his stronghold, called The Citadel, doling it out whenever he sees fit. He also uses women for their breast milk and maintains a concubine of several wives, so you know he's not a good guy.
Working for Joe - or, rather, idolizing him to the point where they believe he and only he can lead them into the afterlife world of Valhalla - are the War Boys, pale zealots who pilot terrifying vehicles of mass destruction and gain their strength and energy by usurping blood from generous donors - like Max. The War Boys love Max.
Anyhow, every so often ol' Joe has to send out an Imperator for supplies; the Imperator drives a huge rig called a War Rig that's exceedingly well armed and customized to the driver's tastes. The driver in this case is Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who has another plan in mind - rescue dear Joe's wives and take them to her own birthplace, the Green Place. Joe quickly gets wind of this and sends out a flurry of War Boys. One of the Boys, named Nux, is weak and in need of blood, so he straps the newly captured Max - a universal donor - to a pole on the front of his machine, and the race is on. Mission for the bad guys - stop Furiosa. Mission for the good guys - get to the Green Place by any means necessary.
Really, the entire movie is a chase across a barren wasteland. It is a post-apocalyptic world, after all. There's leaping from car to car to truck! Oh, and the War Boys? They attach these long, bendy poles on the hoods of their vehicles with one of their own at the top. Then they can bend to and fro and either jump on the War Rig or maybe sneak in through the sun roof, steal a wife or two, and bounce back. Sheer genius! There's an enormous, blinding lightning sandstorm that accounts for much of the CGI in the film, but for the most part the effects are anything but computer generated. Loved the visual look of the movie, too, with washed-out landscapes and colorful foregrounds. Director George Miller's vision shows a world that appears dead on the outside but with glimmers of that most valuable of commodities - hope. And all of the little details, such as the vehicles themselves (some hybrids of 1950s cars, including an original Beetle) and Furiosa's guns and prosthetic arm, add the right touch. And how's his for strange - 3D is put to good use here, with junk (and people) flying off of cars and right between your eyeballs! For much of the first third of the movie, Max wears a face guard that sort of looks like an upside down pitchfork. One would assume Hardy is used to such gear at this point, having been through The Dark Knight Rises as Bane. Here, he's even tougher than Bane, even after he's had blood sapped from him like syrup from a maple tree. Max's name, incidentally, is mentioned only three times in the movie. Which is fine, of course - after all, we the audience know damn well who he is, and the lack of a name for his traveling companions lends itself quite nicely to his anonymity. He's like an even more badass Man with No Name. But he does have compassion, mainly because what haunts poor Max's every waking moment is the feeling that he let innocent people die (see previous three films in the series). Will that happen on Fury Road? Not on his watch! (Possibly.) Hardy is the figurative bomb as Max, a towering dynamo of nonstop energy. Theron gets "ugly" again (note: she is not ugly, even here) with a shaved head, big muscles, and an attitude that would make Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor weep with respect. She should definitely make more action movies, provided they're more like this and not like Aeon Flux. It's always great to see a strong female protagonist, and here we have several; in addition to Furiosa, Immortan Joe's wives aren't wilting flowers but rather ass kickers who can load and fire guns. Pretty refreshing to see that, you know? This latest Mad Max - and will it be the last? - had me on the edge of my seat, which meant that I had to hold on lest I was blown away. But indeed, I was metaphorically blown away anyway, with a much-welcome return to visceral violent cinema in one of the year's top films.