Film review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Never mind the somewhat wonky storytelling, as an action movie Furiosa is hard to beat, writes Alistair Harkness

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (15) ****

Directed by George Miller

Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Ally Browne

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga PIC: Warner Bros

One of the surprising things about George Miller’s belated return to the Mad Max universe with 2015’s Oscar-nominated Fury Road was the extent to which he willingly sidelined the title character. Taking over the role made famous by Mel Gibson, Tom Hardy spent the first half of the film muzzled and strapped to the ship-like bow of a souped-up dune buggy while Charlize Theron sped off with the film as the skin-headed, one-armed, War Rig-driving Furiosa. That no one seemed to mind suggests Tina Turner was right: we didn’t need another hero after all – at least, not another taciturn, vengeance-fuelled, vigilante hero of the old male-dominated movie order.

As if to prove that point, Miller has opted to ditch Max Rockatansky altogether for this latest outing, serving up a full-blown Furiosa origins story instead, with Anya Taylor-Joy now playing a younger version of the character and Chris Hemsworth donning a prosthetic schnoz to play her appropriately named nemesis Dementus, a crazy, would-be emperor of the wastelands who rides around on a motorcycle chariot and kidnaps Furiosa as a child, setting her on her future path to becoming a gnarly bandit queen just trying to get home.

Kicking off with this younger Furiosa (she’s played by Alyla Browne) as she portentously picks a piece of fruit from a tree on the edges of her matriarchal tribe’s Edenic desert enclave, the film actually stays with this child version of the character for a surprisingly long time before Taylor-Joy enters the frame, something indicative of some very wonky storytelling though out the film’s sprawling 145-minute runtime. But if it lacks the narrative concision of its predecessors, its expansive structure (it’s divided into five pretentiously titled chapters) does leave room for so many audacious moments of barmy brilliance that it’s easy enough to overlook some of its niggling weaknesses, even when one of those weaknesses is Taylor-Joy herself, whose scowling intensity feels very one-note when compared to the lived-in quality Theron brought to the role (it’s too bad they didn’t just use de-aging effects).

The good news is that, as an action movie, Furiosa remains incomparable. Each new desert chase feels distinct from the last and each escalating set-piece feels rooted in the physicality of the real world, even when necessarily augmented with CGI. In the film’s most deliriously imagined set-piece, for instance, Furiosa transforms from escapee strapped to the undercarriage of a War Rig to nimble road-warrior-in-the-making as she manoeuvres around the high-speed vehicle taking out paragliding marauders and forming an alliance with Tom Burke’s Praetorian Jack, a kind of proto Mad Max who soon becomes her mentor. Miller’s camera goes everywhere too, but he never loses track of the progression his protagonist is making in each moment. It’s pure cinema, at once harking back to the grimy exploitation thrills of the first two Mad Max films and once again pointing the way forward for blockbuster cinema in general.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in cinemas now