Product: Mad Max (1979)
Rating: 3.0
Brutal and compelling
Max Max is an ugly, bare knuckle movie that shuns sentimentality and explanation. Set in a dystopian future (not really post apocalyptic as many reviews claim - there is no evidence of a humanitarian crisis preceding the action), it features a wild and desolate Australian outback with feral kill hungry violent gangs of motorcycles taking on a quirky, underfunded police force. Max, played by Mel Gibson, is an old fashioned road to calvary type hero. A police officer who becomes disillusioned after the savage burning of one of his colleagues, he quits, but finds the gang have not left him. In horrific scenes, the gang hunts down his family, and Gibson returns to extract revenge, a necessarily determined and scarred loner.Max Max does not stretch out into many dimensions, but it contains a raw savage power and exposes something of the nub of the innate violence at the heart of man. A good one to watch in the line of movies that expose the raw seam below the surface of our civilization.