Mad Max: Through the Hollywood Meatgrinder

Rating: 6/10 (3 June 2015)

Ever since the Mad Max aesthetic was immortalised in the "California Love" music video, a Hollywood remake was an inevitability. The result is in many ways what is becoming the standard Hollywood homage formula - outrageous action sequences strung together by a plot and script that seem to have been cooked up on the back of a napkin at the last minute.
On the plus side, the film has some crazy chases and is continually entertaining in a kind of operatic way. If you want a couple of hours of action-packed silliness, punctuated by the occasional out- of- place bit of brutality and peppered with amusing feminist overtones that will have male rights activists tearing their hair out, then this is for you.
But, being a Mad Max film, Fury Road invites comparison to its predecessors. And, being a film, it also invites criticism as a film. The results are not positive. The plot manages to be both simplistic and ridiculous, suffering badly from being set in a very weird and unconvincing post-apocalyptic environment. Gone are the dogfood dinners, obsession with oil, and lack of everything that characterised Road Warrior. Gone, too, is the historically-based contrast between peaceful town-dwellers and feral bands of nomadic psychos who periodically show up to rob and kill them. Instead we have a strange white-boy tyranny (that's not racism, watch the film and you'll see what i mean) with a semi-divine ruler (his devotees apparently all being on something like crack), so plentifully supplied with water that they can literally shoot it out of giant pipes onto the sandy ground and let people try to catch it in their hats.
The chalky crackheads do all the suicidal driving, and there is also a large population who do... what exactly? Just hang out being thirsty apparently, since the big boss man only opens the giant water pipes for five seconds every day to make sure they don't get a taste for the stuff. The set up is so facile and nonsensical, the revolutionary implications so glaringly obvious, I thought the film wanted me to suspend my disbelief and just accept that the people were whipped. And sure enough, nobody mentioned the political fragility of the made-up mini-society throughout. But they had to have their cake and eat it, didn't they? In the end the film was neatly stitched up with a sixty-second revolution in which the body of the king was presented, the thirsty people chanted a bit, and the few remaining crackheads folded faster than superman on laundry day.
The premise of rescuing the models (yeah you heard me) was weak on so many levels there is no point even going into it. The old ladies in the desert deserves mention for being very nuts. What were they living on? Sand? Some of what they said left the impression that they had lived by shooting poor passers by and taking their stuff, just like the crazies of the original movies, but this is just dismissed as a kind of rustic charm - "oh I always shoot everyone in the head, hahaha!". And this is at the heart of my beef with the film - no psychology, nothing human. At no point do you really believe that the characters have been psychologically shaped by a brutal environment characterized by resource scarcity and and abundance of senseless violence. A man raised from birth to be a kamikaze crackhead is converted by a single insanely out-of-place line about 'manifest destiny' (Yep, the post-apocalypse education system is apparently in pretty good shape!)
Then there is Charlize Theron's escape plan. So the plan is, you escape to your hometown, somewhere that is about three days drive away. And you take with you something so valuable that hundreds of bad guys are guaranteed to follow you there. In broad daylight. Oh and did I mention that Charlize was traumatized when bad guys showed up at her home town and abducted her as a child? That's right, and now she is leading hundreds of badguys back to that very place. Lucky for her when she gets there it's just a big wasteland. Just stop me when this starts making sense. Each one of the many gaping holes in the plot are dismissed in a throwaway line, and the motivations of the characters are given equally short shrift. The sad fact is that there just isn't the time to say anything that doesn't drive the threadbare plot forward.
Like I said, the feminist overtones are fun in their own way, but I have to say on balance I would regard this as a 'femsploitation' flick. The central character is a pretty convincing tough woman, but the coterie of models who accompany her are cardboard cutouts that betray the box-ticking commercialist logic underlying the whole fiasco. In the end the film has ended up more like the video for 'California Love' than a serious attempt to deliver an interesting plot, a social commentary or an enduring vision of a post- apocalyptic world.