Stonking, blood-pumping action classic

Rating: 9/10 (26 October 2016)

Cinema audiences are getting sick of all the reboots, remakes and recycling of classic films and franchises, with good reason. They are equally weary of CGI-laden effects for the sake of it, and endless safe, homogeneous blockbusters.
Add to that the way even venerable film series like Die Hard have been reduced to PG-13/12A fodder where the hero can't even say his own curse-laden catchphrase any more, and you would be forgiven for not expecting too much from 70-year old George Miller returning to his old Mad Max character after a three-decade absence. The film industry today can't do justice to the adrenaline overload of the Road Warrior, right?
Wrong.
Somehow George Miller got One Hundred and Fifty Million Actual Dollars to make an R-rated action film, filled the screen with insanity and grotesques, and delivered on all the empty words other filmmakers have used before like "breathing new life into a classic franchise," "genuine reboot," "practical effects instead of CG weightlessness" and "great action, great story." Just for good measure, he made it into something of a feminist action film and picked up 6 Oscars. In another year he might have had a shot at two more, Best Director and Cinematography. By some utter anomaly it lost out on Best Visual Effects as well. So you can safely say this has been a success.
The film plays out as more or less two unbroken hours of full-on action, mostly on fast-moving machinery, the likes of which you will never see elsewhere. Amid the flame, dust, flying bullets and broken bodies flying through the air you also get a coherent story, told mostly through the kinetic forward motion of the action. This is pure cinema, absolutely brilliant, succeeding on every level. It's not everyone's taste to be based around extended car chases, and some complained about the minimal dialogue of Max who some thought was sidelined by the other lead characters. But in my humble opinion it is entirely consistent with Mad Max 2, where Mel Gibson had just 16 lines of dialogue and the story of the other characters' struggle was seen through his eyes.
This is absolutely essential viewing, if nothing else just to wonder at the thrills, violence, apocalyptic worlds and cannibalised motor vehicles flying across the screen. It's so wild, at a preview screening a member of the audience stood up in the middle of an action sequence, turned to Miller and shouted "How the hell did you do that?" It was fellow action director Robert Rodriguez.
You really can't afford to miss this film.