The Weekend Review: Mad Max: Fury Road

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

It still surprises me that Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the big movies this summer.  On a lot of levels it makes perfect sense: its bleak, dystopian setting is certainly something to school all of the YA derivations with.  Its hard R rating stands out among all of the teen-friendly, PG-13 summer fare that tones down the violence in exchange for a much larger audience to drawn from.  While a lot of great action movies have been getting broad praise for being "more than just an action movie," Fury Road goes in the opposite direction: making the entire movie about its genre, rather than working against it out of some kind of meta-fictive spite.ng into the summer I wouldn

The most recent Mad Max movie is nothing more than it ever sold itself as: an unrelentingly action-packed two hours of death and insanity that'll cost you $10 and a bag of popcorn to see.  It's brutal, savage and one Hell of a ride: a stark contrast to the comparatively light-hearted competition and what will invariably prove to be the best action movie of the summer.

That last part is key to understanding just why this movie works so well.  There's no question in my mind that Age of Ultron is and will continue to be the better of the two movies.  Its witty dialog, nuanced characters and trademarked blend of action and comedy will see to that.  The latest Avengers flick is a great many things, only one of which is an action movie.

Fury Road, however, is not.  It is exactly one thing: a two hour chase scene intermittently broken up by smidgens of world building.  It is, however, the best movie in theaters at what it does.  Say what you will about the rest of Age of Ultron, but the action felt a little samey when compared with the first Avengers.  Nothing really stood out from the fight scenes and the best bits of the movie were always in its down time: whether a party at Avengers Tower or regrouping at Hawkeye's rustic abode.

Mad Max, however, is the epitome of an action movie.  It has great set pieces, exhilarating fights and chases and the most astounding and memorable use of practical effects that I've seen since The Cabin in the Woods.  It doesn't have the sleek veneer of a typically Hollywood production and that's a large part of its charm.

It knows exactly the kind of movie that it wants to be and went well out of its way to be exactly that.  We're dizzyingly entreated to ambitiously scaled, in-camera chase scenes where every crash and explosion is the real deal.

So what if it lacks Marvel's character development or genre hybridization?  So what if Max - or really anybody other than Nux - lacks anything even close to resembling a character arc.  So what if the plot exists only as an excuse for protracted chase scenes?  It invariably delivers on everything last thing that counts in this kind of movie.

There's been a lot of talk about the so-called "feminist agenda" of the movie, which is really nothing more than a genre-specific backlash of the number, focus and development of the movie's expansive cast of female characters.  As one twitter user succinctly put it, "at one point during Mad Max there are 12 women on screen and they all have speaking roles & none of them are talking about a man."

I understand that the Bechdel Test has been ballooned well beyond the point that it was initially trying to make, but its criticism still rings true: movies - especially popular ones - predominantly star, are about and concern themselves with men.  Rightly or not (and the answer is typically "not"), it's a fact of the industry that women are grossly under-represented and their narratives are usually subservient to a man's.

The weird thing is that this movie's become a beacon of internet misogyny, as if daring to make a story where women act like Human beings and can be in charge of the nature and direction of their own narratives is somehow cinematic blasphemy.  Fury Road has a menagerie of fantastic female characters, all with their own reason for being where they are.  The story is one of mutual survival, rather than whisking away with or rescuing the helpless women who got in over their heads.  They don't need Max in any more profound way than he needs them, and that rocks some people to their very core.

Fury Road is without question the single greatest movie in the Mad Max franchise's history.  It post-apocalyptic vision is the best realized yet and the action is, in a word, sublime.  It's a critical step forward to meaningful gender equality in film, especially within the traditionally hyper-masculine action genre,  If you harbored any doubts about this movie before, you can rest assured that Mad Max's only real competition in 2015 is going to come from Spectre.

Rating:  9/10

Buy on BluRay:  Hell yes!

So what did you think of Fury Road?  Was it as good as The Road Warrior?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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