Mad Max: Fury Road

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Mad Max: Fury Road

Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult

Directed by: George Miller
Written by: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris

Rating: R
Genre: Action
Release Date: 2015

I love a good action movie, but these days most action movies involve so much CGI that it can become mind-numbing. What I really loved about Mad Max: Fury Road was there was minimal CGI. It was like the old-fashioned action flicks where what you see is pretty close to what is happening. It makes it all the more exciting. The entire movie is visually stunning and should be seen in the theater on the biggest screen possible to get the most enjoyment out of it.

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Going into this movie, I had heard it was a two-hour car chase, which is true, but there was so much more plot going on than I expected. It begins with Max, haunted by what has happened to him in his past with a brief voiceover about how the world is poisoned from all the oil dredged out of it and water is so scarce that mother’s milk is used as an alternative. He’s kidnapped just before the action begins with the main story involving Charlize Theron’s character Imperator Furiosa trying to save young women being held captive for breeding purposes. She has moved up the ranks in this vile world in order to help tear it apart from the inside. She is the main character of this movie.

It might seem like a trick that Max isn’t the main focus of the story, but rewatching The Road Warrior recently, Max played a similar role. He helped out a group of people that were being terrorized, but he kept trying not to get involved until he couldn’t ignore them anymore. He was also used as a decoy in that movie and isn’t really the one that saves the day. At the end of that movie, he wandered off on his own. Beyond the first Mad Max, there seems to be a central theme in the sequels that we follow him to see what kind of adventures happen around him. He helps out, but isn’t always the hero there to save the day.

Tom Hardy is excellent. He doesn’t say much, but you can tell what he’s thinking. I was worried for a bit that it going to be a bit like Bane when he was wearing a mask at the beginning, but thankfully, he did not talk like Sean Connery so there were no other similarities. Charlize Theron was a badass. She was calm, cool, collected, an excellent shot and really knew how to drive that war rig. I liked that Nicholas Hoult played a war boy so this pretty boy actor was painted white with chapped lips looking like a deformed freak. Speaking of freaks, nothing made me laugh more with glee than seeing the Doof Warrior playing his flame-shooting guitar while hanging from some bungee cords because, of course, a big war party is going to need music to keep the troops energized!

Something also needs to be said about all the vehicles. There were so many crazy vehicles like the ones that looked like a moving porcupine, the vehicles that were made out of two or three vehicles on top of one another to make some monster car, and war rig itself. I loved it when there were war boys on these huge poles that just swung from their own cars over to another one. There was so much running and jumping from one moving vehicle to the next like they were just running on the ground and not on top of cars driving around 100mph.

I cannot recommend this movie enough. This is what I think of when I think of fun summer movies. Everything about the plot of this movie could be depressing, but it is handled with beautiful cinematography, fantastic action sequences and enough adrenaline to pump everyone up. I’ve seen it twice already and wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

Grade: A+

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