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I saw MAD MAX: Fury Road last night. It has its good stuff and bad stuff. Whether you like it depends on what you’re looking for.

THE ACTION:
GOOD: This movie gives you the most over-the-top vehicular chase scenes and REAL vehicular stunts you’ll ever see, from the man who’s already proven himself the master at it.

BAD: Those chase scenes also feature CGI-assisted humans routinely violating the laws of physics and routinely surviving shit that would kill a fuckin’ Terminator. Mad Max 3 did the same in its third act, and fans almost unaminously agree that that was the worst movie of the franchise.

THE POST-APOCALYPTIC AESTHETIC:
GOOD: The post-apocalyptic aesthetic that George Miller pretty much invented is on full-blast here, just like he knew the fans wanted. If that’s what you want, you’ll be absolute Heaven from start to finish.

BAD: That same post-apocalyptic aesthetic doesn’t extend logically from the apocalypse. In Mad Max 2, the post-apocalyptic aesthetic (“garbage-tech,” we can call it) makes logical sense from the non-nuclear apocalypse that the movie’s opening monologue describes (I could type 10 pages on this if I wanted to). It’s also a very effective way for the movie to do some world-building without annoying expository dialogue. Throughout Fury Road, though, I was wondering how what we see extends logically from the nuclear apocalypse that the movie’s opening monologue describes, and I wasn’t coming up with an answer. That implausibility was very distracting to me. I know that a lot of fans don’t care about such things, but I do, because that’s what makes Mad Max 2 NOT just a dumb chase movie. That silent world-building and plausibility is FAAAAR more interesting than just looking kewl; and there’s a TON of stuff in this movie that’s there only to look kewl.

MAX HIMSELF:
GOOD: Tom Hardy does a VERY good job of replicating Mel Gibson’s mannerisms and speech. There were several moments where I could believe that this is the same guy who survived Toecutter and would later survive Lord Humongous. Until…….

BAD: Max’s character motivation has been completely rewritten from the originals, which makes is IMPOSSIBLE to believe that this is the same guy from then. SPOILERS FROM THE ORIGINALS: The entire third act of the original Mad Max features Max descending into psychopathy, and ends with Max finally becoming precisely what he told his boss he was afraid of becoming, "a terminal crazy." And that anti-heroism extends all the way through Mad Max 2 and well into Mad Max 3. In Fury Road, though, suddenly he has his humanity back in the form of guilt-driven flashbacks. Sure, he acts mercenary, but only because of the exigencies of the moment. In the originals, he acted mercenary because he WAS mercenary at heart. To me, this was a turn-off, because I like to think of Max the same way I think of Sherlock Holmes: Someone you'd want to be, but not someone you'd want to hang out with.

THE STORY:
GOOD: None of the Mad Max movies are heavy on story, and this one has enough of a story to carry the action without intruding on it. That’s all it needs, and it’s not implausible until the standard Hollywood trope of insta-revolution kicks in. Good guys flee bad guys, except the good guys are women. The End.

BAD: It’s not MAX’S story!!! Max is just a guest-star in this movie. He doesn’t make things happen, he just gets blown along by events. You could replace him with any action character at all and it wouldn’t change the plot one damn bit.

CALLBACKS TO THE ORIGINALS:
GOOD: There are several visual winks at the originals. They’re obvious enough to notice, but they’re brief enough that someone who hasn’t seen the originals won’t be distracted by them. Also, I found it nifty that of the three chase scenes in the movie, the first one most resembles the chases in the first Mad Max, the second chase resembles the chases in Mad Max 2, and the third resembles the chases in Mad Max 3. I don’t know if that was deliberate or not, but if so, that’s clever! And of course, every fan appreciates Hugh Keays-Bryne, who played the bad guy in the original, playing the bad guy again here.

BAD: That third chase scene that resembles Mad Max 3? It resembles it in MOOD. It has the same twee live-action-Roadrunner-cartoon mood. It made the chase in Mad Max 3 annoying, and it does the same here. The first Max movie is so unsettling partially because the action and violence is played completely straight. Even when a character does NOT die, it’s still rattling to see almost as much as if he had. The second Max plays it mostly straight, too. It’s more of a thrill-ride, but you still get the sense that if the chase doesn’t kill the participants, tetanus will. In Fury Road, though, after a serious first chase and reasonably serious second chase, the third chase keeps nudging us and saying, “Get it? That was kewl, huh?”

BOTTOM LINE: As a standalone chase movie, it’s one of the best you’ll ever see. As a reboot of Mad Max, it’s worth seeing once. As a continuation of Mad Max, it’s pigshit. Since the movie was promoted as a continuation, that’s what I went in hoping for. So I was disappointed. You mileage can, and probably will, vary.

If you are looking for Max's supercool Facon, you can forget it. It makes a brief appearance and then is sidelined for the rest of the movie.

Think Charlton Heston's role in the second Planet of the Apes movie.

You know what is missing from this link?

Let me take you back to a time in the internet. When insane ruled. Youtube was called real player. Blogs were called Internet Diaries. And Channel Awesome was scrubbing toliets. A time when jabootu.net was called jabootu.com.

Let us a remember a lone reviewer who traveled alone and explored cinema's prisons. It was a time of the emerging "Internet Critic." A time of madness.

And let us rememeber, the Warden's old reviews of Mad Max.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030713051905/http://prisonflicks.com/madmax.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20030813034701/http://www.prisonflicks.com/theroad.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20030802201721/http://www.prisonflicks.com/madmax1.htm