The Crazy Piles Up

Rating: 7/10 (14 May 2015)

This movie has an excuse plot and it never pretends it doesn't. The dialogue is simultaneously flat and over-the-top, the actions the characters do at no point make sense and the only thing even remotely approaching a character arc is Nux's and the bulk of it is over a one-minute-long half-cooked conversation.
In any other movie, that paragraph above would mean a rating of 2 or 3 from me, what pushes it to 7?
Well... Everything else! The aforementioned excuse plot is there to have Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy and Nicholas Hoult witness and participate in Miller's string of increasingly insane ideas.
This is obviously a movie the director had been waiting to make since the 70s, but the technology of the time and the budget didn't allow him. In retrospect, that worked in the other movies' (well, 1 and 2) favor since the less focus on crazy stunts meant more care for the characters, but I digress.
This movie doesn't let its audience rest, for the most part. After every over-the-top stunt happens, something even crazier follows. Most of it is stuff we had seen before in other movies, mind you, but this movie's achievement is that it puts it all together and at no point one even questions what is happening. Most of my objections came after leaving the theater and thinking back on the "plot".
A testament of my sensibilities, though, is that my favorite scene doesn't involve cars or explosions: It is the perfectly choreographed, adeptly directed, completely believable, raw and brutal fight of Max and his unlikely ally vs Furiosa and the Five Wives. It was almost transfixing.
This is definitely a movie worth watching (albeit maybe not rewatching, I'm pretty sure most of the craziness loses its impact on second watch and one will find its lack of pathos more obvious).
Plus, there's a red-clad guy on top of a truck playing a humongous guitar he also sleeps on. Anyone's argument is invalid.