What’s the greatest action movie of the 80s? 
That’s an easy one. It’s The Road Warrior. Mel Gibson’s best film. The car crash champion of the decade. One of the ultimate “guy movies” (absolutely no love story here). The one where Mel has about seven lines of dialogue in the whole film because he’s too busy brooding, blowing heads off with a rifle and running over mohawk-sporting bad guys with a big rig. The movie so good that Mel could yell racial slurs at your grandmother and you’d still love him.
It doesn’t get much meaner than this. Even the cute little kid is a killer. The world here is one big post-apocalyptic desert and everyone is cutting each others’ throats over gasoline and food. That’s why a small community who’ve figured out how to drill and refine oil is in big trouble. There’s a huge gang of killers in leather bondage gear out in the wasteland who want to barge in, slaughter everybody and make off with the juice. Enter wandering loner Mad Max to save the day.
This is essentially a western, but with rusty cars instead of horses. It’s desert-scorched and sweat-soaked. Mel Gibson’s Max, like so many western heroes, sees his character tested (is he noble or is he a selfish jerk?) by the demands of living in a violent, lawless land. Some of the bad guys here even wear Indian-like warpaint. All it’s missing is a saloon with swinging doors.
Directed brilliantly by George Miller, who never lets up on the tension and populates the screen with lots of oddball peripheral characters.
Most of the world calls this Mad Max 2, but in the USA—one of the few countries where the first Mad Max wasn’t a hit, because the company that distributed it here bungled the job—it’s almost uniformly called The Road Warrior.