Mad Max: Fury Road provokes the same question from its audience again and again: What can you show me next? The answer is always the same: Something even more outlandish and imaginative than what you just saw.
George Miller, the Australian action wizard responsible for 1979's Mad Max, 1981's Road Warrior and 1985's Beyond Thunderdome, has upped the ante on his post-apocalyptic steampunk vision. Fury Road is louder, bloodier, grimier and more relentless than its predecessors. But it's never needlessly flashy. It revels in the retro by embracing human stunt work and using CGI as a complement where so many movies of this ilk work the other way around.
The barren desert world traversed by Tom Hardy's Max and Charlize Theron's Furiosa is laden with blood, scars, chrome, dirt and automotive contraptions that might have escaped a sci-fi lowrider convention. (I'm particularly fond of the muscle car on tank treads.) It very rarely pauses to catch its breath. There's just enough dialogue to tell a primal story of survival and rebirth.
"I live, I die, I live again." That's the mantra of an ambitious slave (Nicholas Hoult, his lips made up to look like a baseball seam without the red). Of course he doesn't really want to die; that would mean missing the next frantic chase.
Fury Road does what it does so well that you're quick to cut it slack on the rare occasion when the storytelling gets squishy. Miller is a surrealist who loves to get his hands stained with flesh, blood and dust. The movie's impromptu medical maneuvers include a merciless Caesarean birth and a high-speed blood transfusion.
Miller's most vivid imagery is always shot through with organic touches, including a warlord whose breathing machine bares real teeth and a slave labor system with elaborate gears and a sheer scale out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
For a movie of such otherworldly visual flourishes, Fury Road is remarkably tactile and even old-fashioned in its action execution. The stunt work's integrity and jaw-dropping conception would bring a smile to the face of Yakima Canutt, the stunt wizard who helped bring the motion to some of John Wayne and John Ford's most graceful work. Except these guys aren't jumping from stagecoaches to horses. They're leaping from monster rigs and firing shotguns as they swing back and forth on giant poles.
The story recalls another one of the best action movies in recent years, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. Furiosa enrages chief warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) by absconding with all of his wives, who also happen to be his kingdom's breeders. Their destination: "The green place," where they can start a new civilization, and where they're not forced to harvest their mother's milk. Fertility equals survival.
With Theron getting her Sigourney Weaver on (she provides as much of the movie's muscle as Hardy), and the story's emphasis on the role of women, Fury Road should provide grist for plenty of theses on the feminist action movie.
But the best story here is Miller himself, the old-school action director coming back to show the youngsters how it's done. Quick, show me some more. Mad Max: Fury Road serves up one adrenaline fix after another.
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (A-)
Directed by George Miller. R (intense sequences of violence throughout and disturbing images). 120 mins. In wide release.
