![]() Fury Road is essentially one long cacophonous, action-packed chase sequence, shorn of much in the way of back-story, plot or even dialogue. Not that Miller allows too much context or worthiness to slow down proceedings. Furiosa and the Wives may be brutalised, but they are never reduced to mere victims, nor are they simply damsels-in-distress for Max to rescue. And though it’s true that Joe’s scantily clad wives all look like they’re on the way to a photo-shoot, Fury Road, while a typical boy’s movie on the surface, is really all about the women. Indeed, much has been made of this film’s feminist leanings (which, hilariously, have ruffled the feathers of men’s rights activists). She and her cohorts take the lead in combating a literal patriarchy that reduces its subjects to so much meat – women are used for breeding (and, in one gross sequence, to supply nourishing breast milk for Joe’s horde to feed on) while men are cannon fodder, convinced that death in battle will lead to an eternity in a macho-paradise Valhalla. But interestingly, while it’s Max’s name on the posters, it’s Furiosa who is the real protagonist here, Theron commanding centre-stage. With his gravelly voice and rough demeanour, Hardy proves an able replacement for Gibson. But it’s not long before Joe’s War Boys are in hot pursuit, amongst them an eager-to-please young warrior called Nux, played with touching innocence by Nicholas Hoult. Captured by the forces of local warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter back in the original 1979 film), he soon finds himself on the run alongside Furiosa (a magnetic Charlize Theron), a rogue lieutenant of Joe’s who seeks to deliver his reluctant harem of wives (Rosie Huntington-Whitely, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Courtney Eaton and Abbey Lee) to freedom. Pitched somewhere between a sequel and a remake (knowledge of the previous films is not required), Fury Road finds post-apocalyptic wanderer Max (now played by Tom Hardy) roving the desertified wastes, haunted by visions of his murdered family. ![]() But never say never: after three decades Miller has returned with Mad Max: Fury Road and thank God he did – Fury Road is an exceptional piece of action film-making. With a planned fourth film languishing in development hell, Miller went on to work on Babe and the Happy Feet films, and star Mel Gibson went on to become a Hollywood A-lister before falling spectacularly from grace. To put that into perspective, the Berlin Wall had good years more recently than that. It’s been 30 years since the last Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third and last film in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Mad Max series.
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