Review | Film review: Mad Max: Fury Road - post-apocalyptic mayhem returns
This frenetic two-hour movie, which is by turns despairing, tragic,high-octane and stuffed with a cavalcade of freaks, will floor you. British actor Tom Hardy is in his element as the new Max.
Director: George Miller
Category: IIB
In the opening sceneof Mad Max: Fury Road, a lone man with savage eyes turns to the camera while the tail end of a lizard disappears into his mouth. It is, after all, breakfast time. That's about the least squeamish part in this frenetic two-hour movie, which is by turns despairing, tragic,high-octane and stuffed with a cavalcade of freaks.
Australian director George Miller, who in 1979 introduced the world to an unknown by the name of Mel Gibson in his first Mad Max film, revisits the post-apocalyptic landscape by installing Tom Hardy as the new Max Rockatansky. Brilliant in Locke and terrifying as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, the British actor is entirely in his element here.
Rockatansky is haunted by the loss of his family, but pushes himself to survive with an almost Rambo-like indestructibility. He is joined by Imperator Furiosa, a one-armed Charlize Theron with a buzz cut and tattooed forehead who drives the War Rig. The pair are accompanied by Nicholas Hoult, once the adorable tyke in About a Boy, but here a lunatic white-skinned gang member named Nux.
The landscape against which all the madness plays out is called the Wasteland. It's been 45 years since the end of the world (a recurrent line is "Who killed the world?"), and the survivors live in an endless desert. Almost all life forms are dead, there's no food and the most important men are sustained by breast milk, pumped through elaborate machinery by Rubenesque new mothers impregnated just so they can feed.