Mad Max Fury Road Review

Anyone with any knowledge of action cinema knows that the key to action is all in the editing, it’s in how you piece the film together. What’s interesting about Mad Max’s return to the screen is that it was made (at least to begin with) from thousands of storyboarded images rather than a script. This is incredibly noticeable in the films narrative, whose plot is essentially, good guys on a war rig escaping bad guys chasing them, think Stagecoach if it was done by scrapheap challenge. There’s no real time wasted on characterisation so it’s a good thing all the characters have such great names, non more so than Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa, who really is the lead of this film, which is a good move considering Tom Hardy’s Max is actually really boring, he’s a great actor but not a great movie star, and in a film with minimal dialogue I don’t think his presence can carry the film. However the star of this film is the director George Miller, he hasn’t directed an action film since the 80s, but Miller has turned up with a film that has shown us what we’ve been missing amongst all the CGI dross of the last 30 years. The film is manic, but its beautiful at the same time, Michael Bay thinks that you can destroy things and it’s a film, George Miller knows that you have to find the beauty within the destruction, and his destruction is almost ballet. The problem is Mad Max is and will always be an exposition film, and that’s a format that works best over 90 minutes, at a running time just over 2 hours it begins to become a bit exhausting. But there is so much in this film to enjoy, and with future sequels in the works it’s interesting to see where it goes next. (Low 5 Stars)