Movie Review - Mad Max Fury Road

We went to see this last night, the opening night. We got to the theater about an hour before show time because we thought it would be crowded. We were the fist into the theater. The theater eventually got to be about 1/3 full. I predict a bad opening weekend.

Of the 120 minutes of this movie, I'd easily say that 100 minutes of it were car chases and running battles. If this is what you like about the Mad Max movies (and really, what more is there), then you'll love this movie. Is Tom Hardy a good replacement for Mel Gibson? Sure, it's not like there is any actual acting in the movie.

The action scenes are very well done. The action is relentless, from the opening Warner Bros. logo to the end credits. The dialog in the movie would take up, maybe 10 double-spaced typewritten pages. And some of that is grunts. In fact, Tom Hardy hardly more than grunts through the first half of the movie.

There is a plot, sort of. Charlize Theron is Imperator Furiosa. I was never clear if this was her name or her title. She's actually the main character in the movie. Max is just along for the ride. Fury is trying to escape The Citadel, where one crazy guy controls the water and the good looking women and the guns. Max, who is haunted by dreams and visions of those he couldn't help in the past, ends up helping her. The eventual lesson of the movie, if you can call it that, is that there's no place like home.

Do  you have questions like, how could civilizations degenerate so far since Max was a young man? In what appears to be a vast featureless desert, where do people find enough food and water to survive? Are there sufficient oil reserves in Australia to support this level of automotive activity? Where do all the bullets come from?  Forget all these questions, the chase is on!

The last real Mad Max movie, with Mel Gibson, was"Beyond Thunderdome". It was released in 1985. Of the three people with me in the theater (2 of my kids and one of their friends) only one of them was alive then, and he was only 1 year old.