It was in the mid-90s when Hollywood decided that action movies needed be more wimp-friendly. A bunch of potatoheads with marketing degrees figured out a way to maximize profits if everyone would tone down the carnage and aim for a nice, cozy PG-13 rating. From then on (with a few exceptions), it was no longer cool to blow a hole clear through a guy and paint the wall behind him red. Shooting an arrow through someone’s throat was bad for box office, exploding heads might bother peoples’ grandmas and throwing toxic waste on a guy so that he starts melting onscreen was somehow considered insensitive. As Schwarzenegger and Stallone started to make kids movies and comedies, the new action stars became types like Will Smith and Keanu Reeves, guys who’d NEVER break someone’s arms with their bare hands, then kick ’em in the face and then shove ’em off the roof of an eighty-story building. Fun stuff like that just didn’t happen anymore.
In the 90s, NICHOLAS CAGE, a guy who’d much rather talk all day than slit someone’s throat, became an action star. That alone tells you that something was wrong.
Knowing all of this, I was a little scared of a new Mad Max movie. Even with George Miller directing, I thought they’d screw it up. The potatoheads were gonna be all over this script. Max would make Joss Whedon wisecracks (or have a cute sidekick who does). The post-apocalypse wasteland would be a little less threatening, with the odd Chipotle or Apple Store open for business in the background. Theme song by The Foo Fighters.
And I was wrong. Thank God.
Miller keeps it mean and ugly here. The bad guys are grand grotesques, the bodies fly all over the screen and this desert wasteland is no joke. Meanwhile, Tom Hardy’s Max is so hardened, dirt-caked, sweat-soaked and monosyllabic that he threatens to turn off half the audience. Every line he speaks (when he speaks at all) is a low rumble and he’s half-man/half-animal behind his eyes. He fills Mel’s dusty boots just fine. As for Charlize Theron, she… well, she pretty much plays Mad Max, too, just without the stubble. She’s the same hard-fighting desert lizard, but slightly more evolved because there are other people that she cares about. Her and Max’s uneasy alliance (zero romance between them, but there are several pointed guns and a few pulverizing blows) is the spark of this simple story.
It’s been thirty years since Miller’s last Mad Max movie, but these action scenes are as crazed and brutal anything he did in the 70s and 80s. The man knows how to put on a show. Miller’s chase scenes are full of fire, death, noise, rumbling engines and furious wheels. There are digital effects here, but they come and go in a flash. Meanwhile, Miller takes the blue-and-orange color scheme common in modern films and turns on the saturation. It’s okay, though. This is not supposed to be a pretty world. The colors are an assault, like everything else in this land of prey and predators.