Furiosa – a review

Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa: like a homicidal driver overtaking you

I left the Ocean Terminal cinema that doubles as a mausoleum angry on two counts. The film runs two hours twenty-eight minutes. Attend a late night showing, 10pm, and with adverts and trailers, you won’t leave the cinema until after 1am and still have to get home. At that time the cinema is almost empty; you might as well watch it on a large television screen at home and avoid the echo chamber. Secondly, the film is a truly terrible over-inflated, over-long, over-blown, sprawling mish-mash of retreaded ideas. That’s a lot of hours to lose from your life you will not get back.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, is not like other “Mad Max” film. Where Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) had its moments, it was a tired franchise, and looked at the end of the road, revenge for ever had palled and stalled. Fury was plotted over three days, Furiosa takes place over 15 painful to watch years and tells the origin story of Imperator Furiosa in five chapters; which come with titles, such as “The Pole of Inaccessibility”, whatever that means. The film has a cast of thousands of unwashed, depraved hooligan bikers with rusty weapons and rotten teeth. A commercial for Harley Davidson it is not.

The first third is good to watch, visual images of an abstract desert are always calming and soothing, even if in Furiosa’s case a steal from the 1982 Conan the Barbarian. but as the action turns into thunderous sequences and Japaese drumming, it begins to dawn on us that the next two hours will be repeats of the same but bigger explosions, more bodies crushed under tanker wheels, and a villian who does not know when to give up. The director, George Miller, is aiming for his magnum opus, not a good film. (I hear box office is slow.)

George Miller invests himself so heavily in his Mad Max mythology that he competes with himself, and gets mired in a messy mud bath of death and destruction The plot loses all sense of humanity. Miller’s original camera-mounted-at-bumper-level epiphany of a man taking revenge on his wife and baby’s killers – Mel Gibson in black leather – was plausible. This lastest ill-conceived fiasco is not. Characters are universally desperate to die, to sacrifice themselves for nothing in particular than they enjoy killing people and welcoming their own death. This film is preparing us for conscription and war. Comic book stuff it may be, but filmmakers are supposed to keep our suspenison of disbelief working in their favour.

Born to play the baddy: Chris Hemsworth as Dementus

It has one decent element, and that is ward lord Chris Hemsworth, no razor beard, (most everyone is clean shave) muscles pumped up until almost bursting, playing the arch villian with a putty nose, a trailing cape, and a teddy bear strapped to his back like a backpack to remind him of his lost family. His macho followers see no prissiness in his child-like talisman. He drives a chariot pulled by three attached motorbikes, a slick idea, only it leaves him wide open exposed to sniper shot and bomb thrower, and disastrous rollover. The actor is enjoying his scenes, and that is conveyed to us, but we wonder how such a man leading other men, could make so many stupid decisions, countless men and machines lost in horrific chases and accidents, and his men still follow him and do as told. And how does he feed them? To find his biker gang, his Dementus policy for staff recruitment is to choose only the dumbest guys who never wash. This is epic death without a backstory.

As for the females lead, she can do intense: she does a lot of staring, (her eyes are wide apart) glowering, growling and groaning. You can hear the pre-script meetings – let’s make another Mad Max but about a woman, a born feminist, tough as elephant hide, and she does what men do, kills them. Please treat cinemagoers as intelligent. (Or perhaps not for paying £10 to see this desert rats of a film.) The scenes where Furiosa passes herself off as a boy are not in the least convincing. When she grows up, played by the wide eyed Anya Taylor-Joy she’s a powerful killer with a conscience for justice taken to extremes. She reacts to events, not cause them, a road warrior whose main lesson in life is to get her greasepaint perfectly aligned with her facial contours, but never use the truck’s vanity mirror to do it while driving at breakneck speeds. And the film’s end hint at another ‘Maxene Goes Wild’ sequel. By the way, her love interest in her co-driver comes out of nowhere late in the day, then fades into nowhere.

The story begins well enough if deravitive. When the young Furiosa, played by Alyla Browne, is first captured, we think horrible things are going to happen to her. She is driven across the desert, slung over his motorbike and taken to meet Dementus, forced to tell him of her hidden land of plenty, of the oasis she came from, a Garden of Eden straight out of a wholefoods commercial. It can only survive by having mountains, fresh water and rain clouds, mountains and clouds no one on a raucus motorbike asking where this abundant place exists has ever seen on a dead flat horizon. But then Furiosa’s mother shows up to rescue her – a ruthless warrior named Mary Jo Bassa, (Charlee Fraser) who knows how to repair and ride a Thunder Bike and is willing to die to protect her cub. From then on it is one eardrum busting cacophony chase this way and that, and back again, U-turns and retreat, more handbrake U-turns throwing up tons of sand spewed in the air, courtesy of digital magic.

Cut! “Sand! I need sand! Give me more sand!”

From two-thirds on the plot is so demented and complicated it becomes impossible to extrapolate. But then, those who want to see this visual riot won’t care about methodical consistency. They watch a fantasy where no one talks of peace, only deals. The action sequences are impressive, if over-stuffed.

What I took from this sad new saga is the depressing vision of humanity’s last years, a vision of the future and the continuing dehumanising of women, an action-revenge tragedy, gritty, grotty, and bloody.

I think I fell asleep twice for minutes despite the crashing carnage and orchestral whooha! Two stars.

• Star rating: Two stars
• Director: George Miller
• Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Lachy Hulme
• Writer: George Miller, Nico Lathouris. 
• Cinematographer: Simon Duggan
• Composer: Tom Holkenborg.
• Adult Rating: 15
• Duration: 2 hour 28 minutes
• RATING CRITERIA
• 5 plus: potential classic, innovative. 5: outstanding. 4: excellent. 3.5: excellent but flawed. 3: good if formulaic. 2: straight to DVD. 1: crap; why did they bother?