Crap Max: Fury on the spectator

Rating: 2/10 (30 December 2015)

Understand first where I come from. I am a die hard fan of the Terminator saga, and particularly loved T2. I watched all previous Mad Max movies and I did like them. And I have seen pretty much every post-apocalyptic movie and TV show there is, because this is how I roll.
So when I come to see Mad Max 4 I know what to expect. I know it's going to be pretty much action everywhere, a bit of background story, and some character development to keep it all somehow together. I do not expect more, but I also don't expect less because that is what the Mad Max franchise has been giving us.
Then, before I get to see this movie, I read all sorts of great reviews from everywhere. I do not read spoilers, and I do not watch trailers, but I can feel from all these reviews that this Mad Max movie seems to have something going for it. It even ranked number 1 of 2015 in IMDb, the very site where I do all my movie reviews, so I decided to give it a go.
Unfortunately, this is what I've found: A Benny Hill-esque type of movie but without trying to be fun. Also without any character development, background story, or pretty much anything other than action that gets boring after the first five minutes of it.
And it's not like the story didn't have a change to fill those gaps: The main characters give us a hint, even sometimes a mysterious indication, of things that happened to them and things that they wanted. What happened to character X's past that are so present in the movie? What sort of accident happened to character Y? Why character Z became the big boss of that one tribe? Unfortunately there seem to be no time to answer any of these questions, or any question for that matter, nor time for any development or attachment whatsoever.
Speaking of time, you may argue that there was none for all the questions I had. Well, Mad Max 4 is a good 2 hours, so I tend to disagree with that. The movie could easily do without 20 minutes of meaningless vehicle chase and put that time for the audience to learn the bare minimum about the characters so we did not feel we where the audience of some sort of monster truck show.
To make matters worse, the movie don't even have the minimum respect to fundamental physics. And nope, I am not splitting hairs here. I am not going to tell you that a vehicle cannot fly that high or anything like that. I am going to stick to the basis: Humans cannot run as fast as moving vehicles at high speed. Humans cannot run for miles without panting for at least a couple of minutes. Pregnant humans on their nine month of pregnancy cannot run as fast as non-pregnant humans. And of course, if going in a hurry from point A to point B takes X hours, going back in the exact same route with the same hurry should take more or less the same time. But not in the world of Mad Max 4. Here everything goes because, apparently, the audience will love the franchise so much that it will justify every single of the many errors of this movie.
The funny thing is that for a while it seemed to work. I went to watch it with someone not familiar with the franchise, and for a while I tried to forgive and explain the movie, as in "well, maybe the vehicle looked like in a hurry but in reality was making 2 miles an hour" but at the end my companion and I decided to laugh it off even though the laugh was on us because the investors of these movie were the ones pocketing our cash.
So my advice to you is the following: Do not bother. Wait until it goes for free on your TV, or you have a long flight and it's on. Or skip it all together. Watch again one of the old Mad Max movies and be done with it.