To close out the first act of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road we get an epic car chase that ends with the opposite of a bang.
A war boy opens the valves in his car, flooding it with flammable liquid. He ignites a flare, set on kamikaze-ing his junkyard on wheels into Furuiosa’s war rig. In the knick of time, Max intercepts the flare before it contacts the pool of death, which would send everyone to valhalla. The car takes a tumble, as they tend to do in the Millerverse, and the fuse dies in the sand. Fade to black, then fade into Max regaining consciousness, submerged in a dune the next day.
What a way to diffuse and defuse the tension. Fury Road is essentially a few action set pieces, with transitions like this one in between. The storytelling is so economical. It’s a ballet of bullets, steel, guzzoline and chrome – every acrobatic movement building the world and its characters.
Furiosa has way more “defusing” moments than its predecessor. What made the last Mad Max movie such a singular achievement were its seemingly endless action sequences that never felt gratuitous. Furiosa is not the same movie…which is ultimately what you want in a prequel. But then, it doesn’t pull off the same impressive no breaks/no brakes scheme as the act its following.
Furiosa is split into five distinct chapters over several years. Characters parlay in war rooms over Wasteland territorial struggles in between punching, shooting and revving it out on the sandy battlefield. Simply, we have more downtime this time around.
It’s a common pitfall of prequels/sequels to retcon its franchise to oblivion. Furiosa doesn’t quite do that, but sometimes it shows us the behind the scenes we aren’t necessarily interested in seeing. The magic of Fury Road is that we discovered the lore of the Wasteland while being taken along on a high speed chase. That’s more fun than listening to someone tell us a post apocalyptic history lesson.
Apart from the typical prequel woes, lulls in action and the much maligned over use of shabby CGI (not as bad as the trailer would suggest), Furiosa is awesome. Not as awesome as Fury Road, but awesome nonetheless.
Obviously, we came for the cool car chases. And cool car chases we got. Especially considering we all thought we’d seen it all with the four other movies in the series, Miller has come up with innovative ways dieselpunk Australians chase after each other into the vast outback nothingness. But the biggest standout was Chris Hemsworth’s performance.
Hemsworth breathes rarified as a member of the Avengers, globally recognized as one of the dozen or so ubiquitous superheroes. Here, he turns heel. He’s goofy and menacing, like a WWE star taunting the audience, pumping us up. We love to hate him. Anya Taylor-Joy also shines on screen, as always, but is not as convincing as a badass as Charlize Theron, who stole the last movie.
Like the namesake character driving her war rig filled with breeders across the desert, Furiosa delivers the goods. But just a little slower than Fury Road.
