James’s review published on Letterboxd:
Monthly franchise May 2024: Mad Max
A near perfect action flick.
The film follows Max as he fights back against the warlord Immortan Joe while helping a group of fleeing women led by the fierce Furiosa.
Finally, after being mostly amused, but ultimately disappointed by all prior entries in this franchise, we've finally reached Miller's Magnum Opus. I do genuinely mean it when I say that this is easily his best work to date, with exciting, practical action, beautiful cinematography, an excellent, pulse pounding score, unforgettable world and character design, some of the best editing I've seen in any film, period, it's genuinely quite hard to critique his work here. Everything behind the camera is just so well done. He somehow managed top craft a film that is, for all intents and purposes, a 2 hour car chase and manages t make it consistently thrilling and surprisingly emotional. It's one hell of a balancing act that Miller pulls off like it was nothing, and I cannot fathom how he even managed to get this film made.
The cast here is also quite solid, with Tom Hardy doing a solid job stepping into Mel Gibson's iconic role. As far as who I prefer, it's hard to tell, both are great, Gibson's feels more intimidating, whereas Hardy's is definitely leaning more into the "Mad" (in the Hatter sense) descriptor, seeing and hearing things along his journey, so they're going for different things, and both do it well. I'd definitely need to see more of his take to decide on a preference. Charlize Theron is also fantastic as Furiosa, the character that the film is arguably more about. Furiosa is a surprisingly deep character for this franchise, with a dark, obviously troubled past that she is trying to reconnect to. She's a far more compelling character than Max here, and that's not a strike against him, she's just a very compelling and a character worth getting invested in emotionally. That said, the women they are protecting are admittedly quite flat. They really lean into the girl power, which is nice, but I feel like we missed the opportunity to really get to know them, and most are played by pretty solid actresses (like Zoe Kravitz and Riley Keough). Nicholas Hoult is also quite good as a warboy named Nux going through a phase of self-discovery. I also quite enjoyed the return of Hugh Keays-Byrne (the villainous Toecutter in the orginal film) as Immortan Joe, the films' antagonist. He's nothing special as far as his character's writing is concerned, but his design and off kilter personality make him an antagonist worth watching.
As far as issues go, I mostly have some small nit picks. One of my issues is that the visuals can be a bit iffy nowadays. The practical stuff all works, the stunts are awesome, the vehicular combat is always fun to watch, but at times the film uses CGI, and those shots stick out like a sore thumb (i.e. some really distracting day-for-night shots, downright ugly muzzle flashes, a few crashes). I also think that the film slows a bit in the middle as Max and co. stop to build up their characters while the mob chasing them attempts to catch up to them. It never becomes a drag, but you do feel it when the film stalls out in the middle. It quickly returns to the pace it was achieving prior, but it's still a small issue in an otherwise amazing piece of action cinema.
In the end, this is one of my favorite action movies of the past decade, and one that I cannot recommend highly enough. Cannot wait to see Miller continue to explore this world with Furiosa next week.
