Mad Max: Fury Road

Scummy, dangerous, and terrifically enjoyable, Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the best action films in recent years, featuring nerve-wracking stunts and the return of the franchise's'iconic weaponized vehicles.

One of the greatest joys of movie-watching is seeing one person's particular vision or style shining through the countless layers of editing, re-shooting, re-recording, re-writing, and general compromise that comes with shooting a movie, especially one with any kind of large budget. When hundreds of people you barely know are working on something like this, it takes a special kind of personality and guiding hand to maintain the film's style. With an ample supply of both money and talent, George Miller's post-apocalyptic touchstone roars back to life.

First off: Fury Road isn't a reboot. Its simply a direct continuation of the previous Mad Max movies with a new Max, Tom Hardy. Hardy's handling of the role is much like Kiefer Sutherland's replacing of David Hayter in the new Metal Gear games -- he seems good, but only had roughly five lines of dialogue so it's hard to tell for sure. To be fair, Fury Road has a pretty light amount of dialogue in general, but Hardy certainly has the "gruff mush-mouth" type down pat -- and for most of the movie, Max is just along for the ride as other characters drive the plot -- a plot that is pretty stripped down, with just enough hints and details to flesh things out while still serving as a series of, honestly, pretty compelling reasons to watch insanely tricked out vehicles crash and and explode.

The vehicles, of course, are the heart of soul Mad Max, and the ones created for Fury Road are nothing short of breathtaking. The chase/battle scenes are the centerpiece here, and the more than 150 (!) unique, hand-made cars and trucks created for them are fully-driveable works of art. These sequences are psychotic waltzes of sand-coated brutality with some very impressive stunt work and choreography -- roughly 90% of the action is practical, i.e. real. I would be remiss if I didn't give huge props to Colin Gibson, the production designer who brought Miller's automotive insanity to life.

As far as the story and acting goes, it's solid. There isn't a whole lot of exposition, but what little of it exists is delivered convincingly, and Charlize Theron wrings pretty much everything possible out of her character. On thing about the characters here: they die with surprising frequency and suddenness, and those deaths hit way harder emotionally than I thought they would.

As a full-on action movie, Fury Road is incredibly solid -- an effective plot, solid acting, with an emphasis (honestly, a reliance) on over-the-top chase sequences that are both nauseatingly dangerous to watch and insanely well put together, with top-notch visual design and cinematography. It's definitely worth a test drive.