Product: Mad Max (1979)
Rating: 4.0
"Mad Max" stays to this day a striking, desolate, and memorable piece of cinema...
In spite of the fact that the 1981 film The Road Warrior--the second influential cinematic work of writer/director George Miller's Dystopian vision of the near future trilogy--leads to receive the anti-hero Max, released two years earlier, is where it all started... For it was here that Miller first brought to the screen his hellish vision, where civil society is under siege by crime and disorder, with the strength and charisma of a new young, tough, good looking actor by the name of Mel Gibson...Gibson was just 23 years old when he took the role of Max Rockatansky--a young hotshot cop so emotionally wounded--and was such an unknown star that when the film was hitting the screens in the States, the preview trailers didn't even mentioned him but instead focused on the movie's coolest and most original car action ever filmed... In retrospect, of course, Gibson's portrayal of a relentless vigilante is an essential element of the picture...In the Australian outback, Rockatansky is a motorcycle cop trying to keep order in a quickly disintegrating society... Vicious lawless bikers and road-raging psychopaths race up and down the forbidden territories, raping and pillaging the peaceful towns, and one such bunch ends up at the door of Max's wife (Joanne Samuel), and their 2-year old son... When they are both lying dead in middle of the road, Max is all driven over the edge, and so starts a high-speed pursuit involving wild rides, chilling fights, and memorable fast-motion suspenseful scenes rarely equaled in cinema...