What other action movies ought to be doing

Rating: 9/10 (1 June 2015)

I watched Fury Road and Avengers 2 within a week of each other, and the difference was like night and day. Fury Road is an exemplar of what action movies ought to be like, and Avengers 2 is an exemplar of what they're like instead. I'd written off action movies completely because of the trend toward roller-coaster-ride visual spectacles with huge displays of senseless violence and asinine plots. I'm glad I took a chance on Fury Road, because I got the exact opposite.
The balance of show and tell in Fury Road is just about perfect. Miller does a fantastic job as always portraying a lived-in world where we don't need to have the intricacies explained to us in order to make sense of them. The plot is a bit thin, but it's also straightforward and makes sense. Max, the titular wanderer, blows into town just as he did in Mad Max 2 and 3, bringing just enough motivation to get him embroiled in the sympathetic-group-of-the-week's struggles with the villain-of-the-week. Anyone who thinks Max's role in this was too small ought to consider it in the context of the formula established by the earlier movies.
Where most contemporary action movies rest on spectacle, however, Fury Road takes its cue from the better action movies of the seventies and eighties. Spectacle is certainly an important element of the movie, but every blow matters; every fight carries a serious risk of wounding or killing a character or causing permanent damage to the escaping "war rig" the action centers on. The villain's forces are visibly depleted over the course of the movie, in stark contrast to the endless waves of throwaway henchmen in movies such as Avengers 2. Where we've been trained to accept thrown-together plots that simply give a context to action scenes, Fury Road gives us a plot completely interwoven with the action scenes that drive it.
The practical effects were a breath of fresh air from an industry infatuated with CGI, the visual design was imaginative and entertaining, and the actors fit their roles wonderfully, but all of those factors are simply bonuses. The real strength of Fury Road is that it shows that action movies do not have to be monotonous, you do not have to turn your brain off to enjoy a good action movie, and it is not nitpicking to criticize the plot of a summer blockbuster. Fury Road is what action movies ought to be like, and we do not have to accept what we've been shoveled instead for the past two decades.
(As an aside, apparently some people didn't like the movie because they perceived the message as feminist. Some other people say, "you're wrong; it's not feminist at all, and therefore it's acceptable." I'm not going to bother addressing that point, because if you avoid watching movies because they might promote equality between the sexes, then you and I have no common ground.)