Wasted Wastland

Rating: 1/10 (16 May 2017)

Truly one of one of the most overblown, overrated films of all time. While the casting of Tom Hardy is enticing, he spends nearly all of the first half of the film with a metal harness covering his face and the rest of his role is reduced down to grunting like a cave man. Max was never the loquacious type, but Gibson had a talent for displaying his character through looks and subtle movements. And most importantly he was just "cool", like Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name. In fact, a lot of comparisons could be made between the Dollars trilogy and the Max films, until now. Actually, FR feels more like an awful spin-off where the character you really want to see is put to side, out of everyone's way so the filmmakers could make us watch who the film is really about(See Red Sonja). One could still get away with this, if the other film you were using him to build up were any good, but it's not. Oh God, it's not.
It's strange to think the film's title is still Mad Max, almost like they have no confidence in their protagonist's appeal at all. Speaking of Furiosa (who happens to have a name derived from the film's title road), she's about as one-dimensional and uninteresting as the rest of the film. Fury Road really needed to pick a protagonist or at least let her and Max be foils for each other, so that we can get a little character development. There is NONE of that in Fury Road. The only memorable performance comes from Nicholas Hoult, who, strangely enough, seems to be the only one who understands what kind of movie he's in.
And for all those defenders of this film saying that the other Max films were never his story either, let me quell that bulls**t know-nothing argument right now. They were his stories, because he was always an integral part of them. The only one that's not really about him is Beyond Thunderdome, which is/was regarded as the worst of the series, and that's mostly because a bunch of kids hijack the film half way through. The other characters needed him, and though he was always a reluctant hero, he always came through.
Again, he didn't really need to be the focal point of this, but since he happens to go along for the entire runtime of this story, he should at least contribute something other than a random last minute change-of-heart. Otherwise, he's just taking up space, just like this film did in every dead brain cell the human head.
Most of the ideas in this are style over substance. For example: lots of weird spiky cars blowing up, a woman with a robotic arm, a strange breast-milking facility, a giant safe to keep concubine slaves.
They've compared this to The Road Warrior because supposedly both films are "one long chase". Apparently, nobody's seen The Road Warrior because while there are numerous chases in that film (done far better than FR's garbage effects by the way), the film is first and foremost a Western. The Lone Hero wanders into the weak but good-natured town and must reluctantly save them from various bandits and marauders lurking in the badlands. All the Mad Max films were Westerns where the old West was exchanged for a post-apocalyptic outback, and instead of horse rides and gunfights we were treated to high-octane car chases and makeshift guerrilla warfare. In short, it's not about how many cars you could crash, but how much you care about the memorable albeit simplistic characters of his very strange world.
Anybody who says this film has anything praiseworthy at all(even nearly all the critics we respect) has no idea what their talking about. Either this is a truly strange case of bandwagon fever gone tragically awry or the whole world truly has gone mad.