‘FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA’ REVIEW: ANGER MISMANAGEMENT

In the wake of Barbie’s billion-dollar, perfectly arched stride last summer, The New Yorker reported that American filmmaker J.J. Abrams is working on a film version of another Mattel project: an “emotional and grounded and gritty” take on the world of Hot Wheels. A sign of the apocalypse? Well, at least we might have something to watch at Odeon. I thought about that project while watching the latest instalment of Mad Max, Furiosa: Mad Max Saga (about the actual apocalypse!), because director George Miller could be working from the same mood board: here is a film full of scorching hot wheels which aims for something emotional and grounded and gritty. Perhaps Hollywood decided that the Fast & Furious franchise would be better off Fast & Philosophical.

With Furiosa, we are back in Miller’s not-too-distant apocalyptic wasteland (filmed and set in Australia), a while after the first Mel Gibson films and a few decades before 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. As the title suggests, this is an origins story for Furiosa, the buzzcut heroine of Fury Road, played by Charlize Theron. This is the Green Place, a fertile paradise where fruit grows and everyone seems almost happy. But such things can’t last, and sure enough, a very young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is kidnapped by some bad men and ferried off as prize cargo. The ensuing sequence – a chase between Furiosa’s mother (Charlee Fraser, very good) and the ruthless motorcyclists – is the film’s best, choreographed with real danger and tension.

The story sprawls after that. Once Furiosa is in the hands of the film’s villain, a bolshy warlord named Dementus (played by Australian Norse god Chris Hemsworth, with a prosthetic nose), we begin a coming-of-age story which encompasses abuse, betrayal and revenge. How did Furiosa become so furious? It is a question only a sequel prequel can answer. The grown-up version of young Furiosa – what a tangled web these franchises weave! – is played by one of this generation’s more exciting actors, Anya Taylor-Joy. She looks fantastic, obviously, once she makes it on screen an hour into the film and she bristles against the film’s awful men, which include the bigger baddie Immortan Joe (Lachey Hulme). These actors are convincing, though no one matches up to the previous film’s performances, neither Theron’s howling rage or Tom Hardy’s rough-and-tumble wackiness (he played Max, and there is no Max here). Still, at least Hemsworth is having fun!

The stunts are, of course, exhilarating. One sequence in which Furiosa and Praetorian Jack (played by The Souvenir’s bad boy Tom Burke) are ambushed during a gas run is gorgeously satisfying. I’m sure Miller, the man who brought us The Witches of Eastwick and Babe: Pig in the City, had a lot of fun choreographing them. But no matter how inventively you dress that up, this remains a prequel. And so we hit several expected beats. Much has been made of Taylor-Joy’s sparse dialogue (30 lines? She probably had time to memorise the script and watch the four other Mad Max films on her plane ride to down under) but the other characters speak only in exposition. They have to get from the Citadel to Gas Town in order to quell the war at the Bullet Farm, you see? To stop an uprising over the lack of gas and vegetables and water. Or something. Points A and B do not really matter here, only the explosive journeys between the two.

In the film’s more menacing moments – that opening sequence, or when Furiosa is introduced to Immortan Joe’s harem – there’s an intriguing other layer which all too briefly gets to the roots of the main character’s frenzy. But one suspects that this was not quite the right tone for a summer blockbuster. A correct call, though it’s hard not to wonder about a film that went to those darker places and the material it might have provided these very capable actors. But anyway, there is a lorry to blow up. An oil rig to explode. Maybe Hot Wheels will really go there.

‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ is in cinemas now

2024-05-24T08:11:47Z dg43tfdfdgfd