One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Rating: 1/10 (7 September 2015)

After finally renting "Fury Road" online I'm completely baffled by the positive reviews it's gotten. Three elements made the original "Mad Max" movies work: the supercharged car and chase scenes, the shocking stunts often done with practical (real) effects, and Mel Gibson's portrayal of a post-apocalypse anti-hero who is hard and cynical, and the ultimate survivor.
The first movie introduced this world, still in a society we knew but in the middle of a collapse into anarchy, and we see Max when he was a cop before he lost his family. The second movie took this world further where there was nothing left but roving gangs, and the infamous battle down the highway, with a few surprisingly deep philosophical questions. The third movie is where it jumped the shark; the car is gone, and instead the vehicles and people are like something out of a comic book. Max is guardian to a group of children and campy humor replaces cynical reality.
"Fury Road" is essentially "Beyond Thunderdome" remade on a huge budget. The supercharged pursuit interceptor is literally in it for maybe 5-10 seconds, and shows up briefly in a chase scene later.
Absolutely nothing works; the action scenes appear to be deliberately sped up by probably 20% over normal film speed and the result is it feels like a hyped up and amateur martial arts movie. The spectacle is huge, but so overblown your mind doesn't think it's real. As an example of how silly it gets in the earlier movies they had nitrous, now someone literally climbs onto the hood and spits fuel into the intake. For some reason the pale albino foot soldiers have a thing for spraying their mouths with silver paint before doing something suicidal.
I can remember in the "Road Warrior" when the female love interest is pulled off of the truck and Max literally steps out of the door at speed and dispatches the bad guy with a shotgun blast through the windshield; here so many flying bodies and explosions happen it all runs together.
Guns were rare and often unreliable in the earlier movies, this made the idea of marauders doing battle with darts, arrows, and thrown weapons more plausible but also brought the action scenes into close up intensity. Now everyone has a firearm; there isn't a single paved road yet somehow the societies can keep high octane vehicles running.
The producers went into overkill on outdoing each idea with a bigger or more bizarre one. One car has tank treads, for some reason the main villain has rows of pregnant women hooked up to milking machines. One bad guy is a portly businessman in a suit with a club foot and a prosthetic nose, yet holes cut in his clothing to expose his nipples. Many of the vehicles have the style of 2-3 car bodes stacked on top of each other. One of the bad guys is a blind guitarist on a rig that is like a giant sound system, the guitar doubling as a flamethrower. Whatever.
Much has been made about the feminist aspect of this movie, but it's not really brought into focus, just another random idea tossed into the mix. Furiosa is passable, and seems more like Max than Tom Hardy. The entire gist of the story is the villain Immortan Joe is chasing her to get his prize harem back, which he calls his property. Furiosa has some sort of dark past behind her but it's never explained, and late in the movie she finds "home" which is a pack of motorcycle riding grandmother snipers. That's it, no message or depth beyond that.
And finally Tom Hardy as Max---we see over and over hints that he is tormented by the loss of a child and spouse, but it's also never explained. Tom is quite literally just there, with none of the brutal vindictiveness that Gibson's version was capable of.
Overall I don't think I've seen such a mess of a movie since "Waterworld."