MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) Dir: George Miller

I'm not going to say much up here as the following review is quite in-depth, but what i will say is that Fury Road is most anticipated film of the year and having seen it today, it went beyond my expectations. Please check out my review after the jump....

Today I witnessed the re-birth of something incredible. I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, why was it the rebirth of something incredible?, why the word rebirth? What significance does this word have in common with a film?, well let me explain.... Firstly we have to look at the action genre as a whole, well more specifically Hollywood financed action cinema. We all know that the best action films are either from Asian countries like Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and in more recent times Indonesia thanks to The Raid movies or are being relegated to straight to DVD or Blu-ray or in some cases as it seems these days, getting their premiers on On-demand platforms like for instance, this year alone has seen 4 awesome flicks debut exclusively on On-Demand, Jason Statham's Wild Card, Everly with Salma Hayack, Skin Trade with Dolph Lundgren and Pound Of Flesh with Van-Damme, not exactly ground breaking films I know, but they all have one thing in common, they all got Action right. Now we have too look at the studio based films we've been force fed for the last few years, movie after movie of comic book heroes battling other comic book heroes in convoluted plots or giant robots causing mass city wide destruction with little to no plots. Add in relentless sequels, reboots, remakes and tone down the violence and swearing and film 90% of it in front of green screen and you have the state of modern action cinema. That's the problem with action these days, even the big names like Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are falling foul of the PG-13 action film, Sly more the Arnie though whose Expendables 3 was a painful nail in an already closing coffin.

36 years ago, an emergency room doctor decided to make a movie. That man was George Miller, an Australian doctor and film buff who cobbled together some money and worked as an ER doctor to finance the film. The film he made was called Mad Max, it was a low budget exploitation revenge thriller about a cop who's wife and son are killed by a vengeful biker gang. It didn't really work with western audiences due to a fuck up on the part of U.S distributor AIP ( America International Pictures) who redubbed the audio with American accents as they were worried the U.S audiences would be able to understand the Aussie accents but what people over looked in 1979 was how insane the film was in it's action scenes, with seemingly no regard for safety, Miller and stunt co-ordinator, the legendary Grant Page, flipped cars, through bikers off bridges and slammed cars through trucks and caravans. Fast forward to 1982 and Miller's second Mad Max film comes out, re-titled The Road Warrior in the states so not confuse people who hadn't seen MM1, and the stunts Page and Miller concocted for the first film are turned up, The plot is thread bare but it's not the plot you want in film where roads are battle fields and punks ride motor bikes in buttless chaps, The Road Warrior basically invented action cinema. George Miller basically invented modern action cinema, it's as though he made TRW, sat back and said “there we go, i've shown you how to do it, now lets see what you can do”, For me, and i'm a huge Mad Max nerd, TRW is like the holy bible of getting shit right. Miller followed TRW 3 years later with the less popular but still highly enjoyable Beyond Thunderdome but we won't go into detail on that, in fact you can read my reviews of each of the Mad Max films HERE, HERE and HERE.

So in the 33 years since TRW kicked the shit out of action, other directors have upped the game, The 80s was the greatest decade for action, Stallone had the Rambo movies, Cobra, Tango And Cash, Schwarzenegger had Conan, Raw Deal, The Terminator and Predator, oh yeah and the insanely awesome Commando and Bruce Willis arrived on the scene with Die Hard. Cut to the 90s and for the most part the 90s got it right, The Rock, Bad Boys, Face/Off to name but a few but what happened when the 90s became the 00's?, CGI. Now i've made my feeling on CGI very well known, it's a heavily overused tool and one that is ruining cinema, if it's used sparingly then there's no problem, but if you rely on CGI too much, the film loses its soul. Take for example, Terminator 2, a film that brilliantly utilizes practical FX and stunt work with effective CGI. Now take James Cameron's last film, Avatar, (a film which I must admit, I kinda like) with the exception of some scenes, almost the entire film is rendered in CG, and there was no heart to the film and no soul, Something that was present in Terminator 2. Or another example of over using CGI is in films like The Avengers, Transformers and The Fast And Furious movies, although I still dig the F&F series but that last film had some major issues.

So why did I use the word Rebirth?, the answer is simple, through the lense of George Miller and the sheer balls the man has to stage some of the most insane shit you are ever likely to see, Miller has brought to life the genre in which he was originally the father of because i'll tell you this, with Fury Road, Action cinema has been reborn.

Mad Max: Fury Road is an important film. I bet you're asking why is it important? Why are a bunch of cars crashing into each other in a desert so important? It's important because it changes the game and how future action films should be made, it turns the stunts up to 11, seriously, if you go and see Fury Road, you are unlikely to ever see something so mind bogglingly insane ever again. I was literally lost for words as walked out of the cinema this afternoon, I just kept thinking, how the hell did he shoot that? how the hell did that guy not die? how the hell am I so confused by how it was made?

Cars are not light objects, but Miller throws them around like toys, it's absolutely astonishing to see a ten ton truck flip over in a rocky canyon, to see men swinging from poles at about 15 to 20 feet in the air as the vehicles are racking up insane speeds, to see a monster truck jump a ravine and over a truck, to see motorbikes flying around the screen, I could go on but it's something you really need to witness for yourself. It feels like Miller got sick and tired of watching people fuck up what he gave them and decided to show them again. The action scenes are choreographed to a point where they become balletic, like an orchestrated dance of diesel and chrome. The film is important because is sheds light on a past where the stunt man was one of the most important aspects of an action film. It highlights that instead of bob sat at his computer for 12 hours a day rendering a Mustang as it speeds through on coming traffic, that Stunt men, co-ordinators and second unit directors are there on set, using physical objects, in this case a fuck ton of muscle cars and tanks, trying to work out a way for a high speed chase involving 30 cars, motorbikes and whatever else runs on petrol, wheels and a motor and how to film it for real. Someone like Grant Page or Vic Armstrong or Buddy-Jo Hooker or Hal Needham or you name them, brought something real to cinema, they left their legacies but their legacies have been replaced by a mouse and a keyboard.

Yes Fury Road does contain CGI, there are scenes where it is evident but these scenes involve close ups of the actors battling on top of high speed vehicles and insurance wouldn't cover that if it was done for real so a green screen isn't a problem or using CGI to enhance the distant background or this film's epic sand storm, you can't create a sandstorm for real but with CGI you can, it's these smaller uses of CGI that work for the film but this a film about practical action stunts, and ladies and gents, it's a fucking masterpiece of film making.

So i've rattled on for two pages but haven't really talked a whole lot about plot or performances so this is that part of the review...

Mad Max: Fury Road isn't a remake or a reboot, it's a sequel, there I said it, it just doesn't star Mel Gibson, which I know a lot of people are saying it's a reboot because there is no Mel, nope it's a sequel, but it can work as a stand alone film. It really does benefit having a prior knowledge of who Max is and the world in which he lives but it's not essential as there's a sort of mini recap at the start, but I do highly recommend watching them anyway because they're awesome movies.

Fury Road is thin on plot, but it's a mad max movie, it's plot is secondary, it's plot is about as strong as the Road Warrior and follows Max as he is coerced into helping an Imperitor, a wasteland driver, transport 5 women across the wasteland to a place called the Green land, while being chased by the evil Immortan Joe and his army of War Boys.

It's the longest MM film at a run time of 120 minutes but those 120 minutes speed by at an alarming rate because once the film starts there's just no letting up, constant barrage of hurtling chrome and fire.

To the performances; Max is this time played by Tom Hardy, stepping into Mel Gibson's iconic shoes is not an easy task, and a lot of people have been vocal about Hardy's performance, I really liked him in the role, he's definitely not Max, that's for sure but he didn't fuck around by trying to do a Mel impersonation, he made the role his by his physicality and his facial expressions. Hardy's Max is more of the battered wanderer we see in Thunderdome, he looks battered and busied but he can get shit done when he needs to. The only problem I had with Hardy was his accent, it's a bit all over the place, it sounds at times like he's trying to do an Aussie accent then an American accent and then it goes into a london accent and his ADR is a little to deep and is a little hard to hear at times but it's all about mannerisms and how he presents his version of Max. There has been a lot of complaints about Hardy not being the main star even though he plays the title character and how Charlize Theron is the actual focal point of the movie. This didn't bother me in the slightest because Charlize Theron absolutely killed it, she gave one the best action heroine performances i've ever seen, her Imperitor Furiosa is up there with Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor and Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley.

Nicolas Hoult as Nux, the war boy of the group is a blast as a brain washed member of what is essentially a cult, his admiration for Immortan Joe is like the admiration and radical Christian has for Jesus, (if you're offended by that line, then I’m sorry, I’m an atheist) but he comes to the realization and joins the band of outsiders.

Then there's our main villain of the film, the gruesome, god-like, Immortan Joe, played by original Mad Max villain, Hugh Keye-Byrne, a fat, disfigured, body-armoured lunatic dictator of the Citadel, his home and what he would consider the capital of wasteland. He wears a breathing mask made up of tubes and metal with human teeth. He looks like a cross between Skeletor and Darth Vader, infact you could say he was the apocalyptic version of Darth Vader.

The rest of the cast is made up of other known actresses like Zoe Kravits, Rosie Huntington-Whitely, Nathan Jones, Josh Helman, Abby Lee...etc.

The film looks absolutely stunning, the cinematography is so beautiful, each shot could be a painting, it's that gorgeous. One scene where the War Machine is travelling through is a mixture of mud and dead trees but there are these people on stilts just walking around this area and the way it is framed, the way it's coloured is just breathtaking, as if Salvador Dali was the cinematographer on that scene. The film was shot by academy award winner John Seale who won his oscar for lensing The English Patient. Seale came out of retirement to shoot Fury Road and he deserves another Oscar as it's an absolutely stunning visual treat.

The film is set to a score by Tom Holkenborg who is more well known as progressive dance DJ, Junkie XL and holy shit did his music totally make this film ten times more awesome. Booming drums, beautiful strings and some hard beats behind the action heightens the spectacle magnificently. He recently did the music for the Liam Neeson action thriller Run All Night and i'd be interested to see what he does with Zack Snyder's upcoming Batman Vs Superman: Dawn OF Justice score. It's probably one of the best scores of the year so far. I would be interested to see what a Brian May score would have sounded like as he gave us the iconic scores of the previous MM films but he sadly passed away in 1997.

The film also has some nice touches that throw a nod or two to the previous films such as the little wind up music box from The Road Warrior, the over cranked camera which speeds up the frame rate which Miller used in MM and TRW which, for some reason people have a problem with, I don't because i'm very very well acquainted with the previous movies. But while I was watching it I thought wow, wouldn't it be cool in Joe was the disfigured Toecutter who survived the head on truck crash of the first film or how Nathan Jones' Rictus Erectus would go on to become Lord Humongous and how we see some very young war boys with white skin and black eyes and how one of them might have grown up to become the panda kid from Thunderdome. Just little things that kept popping into my head as I lapped up everything Miller threw at me.

So as i've waffled on for 3 and a ½ pages, I guess I should close this review. Mad Max: Fury Road is a game changer, it took a 70 year old man, who hadn't made an action film in 30 years and who's last two films were about singing and dancing CGI Penguins to completely put every action film maker to shame, and he managed to do it in 2hrs on a budget of $100,000,000, thats $110mil less than Transformers 4, see folks, Bay is a hack, Miller is god damn fucking genius.

Mad Max Fury Road is one of the most insane action flicks of the last 15 years and probably one of the greatest action films ever made. See it immediately.