An action explosion with an actual brain, and no regard for gonads

Rating: 9/10 (19 May 2015)

This re-imagined Mad Max film is deserving of every positive review it has received. It's one of those most rare things: a major Hollywood action film with a meaningful plot, an emotional soul and very important points to make about politics, despotism, gender roles and ecology. Yes, it's extremely violent (it's a Mad Max film), but the story assumes that modern society has fallen, and brute force rules in the resulting scramble for resources. You don't tell that story by filming folks engaged in diplomacy.
Director George Miller pulls very few punches here. Humans are set against each other as enemies in furious vehicular battles, and are shown using each other as fodder, as shields, as meat targeted in their cross hairs. It's not for the squeamish. Sam Peckinpah might have flinched a couple of times.
The film carries some cautionary aspects: there's only one person of color in any primary role, and women are shown endangered and exploited. Yet the core of the film is Imperator Furiosa, a female warrior played with grim ferocity by Charlize Theron. She seeks redemption for the bad things she has done, and is willing to chance all in a risky, hurtling plunge to escape her living hell. She and Max, as played with brooding taciturn energy by Tom Hardy, form the tautest of action duos, a partnership driven at first by accident, then murderous animosity, then edgy distrust, and later by mutual respect. Max is only reluctantly saddled with the role of knight errant. He's a battered, cynical, doubtful vagabond pressed into helping Furiosa through a gradual escalation of increasingly bad craziness.
The plot follows Furiosa's rebellion against one of the more fundamentally brutal despots committed to film, a warlord named Immortan Joe, who holds absolute sway over a teeming cluster of humans because he controls the only dependable fresh water supply for thousands of square miles, doling it out from a cliff top keep called the Citadel. His body is racked by radiation deformities, he breathes through a mask styled as a death grin, and his progeny suffer from chronic birth defects. He essentially holds enslaved a captive harem of women whom he calls wives, but the women have no choice in the matter. Furiosa, a trusted mercenary fighter for Joe, launches her long-plotted revolt by smuggling five young concubines out of the Citadel in a tanker truck war rig, a vehicle with such a rugged, beastly aspect that it becomes a character in its own right, the air intakes on its supercharger breathing in the desert air lustily as the behemoth thunders forward like a mechanical dinosaur.
Immortan Joe is extremely angered by all of this. He brooks no interference with his expansive lordship and absolute power. "Do not become addicted to water," he admonishes his vassals, "It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence." (Joe is played with psychotic relish by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also played the bad guy, Toecutter, in the very first Mad Max film.) Joe froths and seethes with malignant furor. Discovering Furiosa's betrayal, he unleashes his dogs of desert hard-scape war, a cadre of true believing fanatic War Boys, who ride a gloriously outlandish collection of vehicles styled after glossy but mutilated classic cars. The mayhem begins.
Two other similarly antisocial warlords join Joe's trek for revenge upon Furiosa. The People Eater is the ruler of Gastown, a refining enclave to the south. He has a deformed foot and a disdain for Joe's family problems. And then there's a reckless firebrand known as the Bullet Farmer, a man who still has the ability to manufacture ammunition, who lacks patience for Joe's tactics, which he considers far too gentle. So, water, gasoline and bullets form the power triumvirate in this twisted pseudo-society.
Tensely allied now with Max, Furiosa's party runs, fights, hides. A stray skinny War Boy, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), realizes the error of his thinking and joins the group, but before that change he is an imprint of the personality cult Immortan Joe has created. As his lone vehicle continues to trail the fleeing war tanker into a dangerously violent electrical storm, he exclaims, in rapture, "Oh, what a day, what a Lovely Day!"
During the last third of the film, the tanker meets a band of deep desert survivors, women called the Vuvalini, and we learn of Furiosa's tragic background. It's at this point her despair finally inspires Max into a pragmatic suggestion. The tactic Max suggests is a calculation which equally weighs their options, the risks, and the ethical demands of the situation.
Now, I must say I find utterly ridiculous the criticisms leveled at the film by various "men's rights" groups, who decry it as a deliberate attempt by Hollywood to "trick" men into going to see a seemingly masculine action flick, only to discover to their distaste that it's really an extended piece of "feminist propaganda." One oft-quoted post bitterly complains: "NOBODY barks orders at Mad Max." That's a mindset not only ludicrous, but seriously lacking in testicular fortitude, a hugely ironic fault in such a misogynistic argument.
With this reboot, George Miller has hit a grand slam home run clear out of the park of typically low Hollywood action expectations. This one sets a new bar, just as "Saving Private Ryan" did for war films in 1998. "Fury Road" isn't just a great action film, it's a great piece of social commentary, full of sound, fury, swirling red dust, crashing vehicles, explosions and enough little bits of petty madness to fill several typical action mill flicks. "Fury Road" delivers the bang, and does so without being brain-dead. On the contrary, the heart and thought embedded here are strong enough to inspire some heated debate, and a long list of critical plaudits. When's the last time you recall an action movie doing that?