The wait was worth it: More than 30 years after “Mad Max 3”, George Miller staged “Mad Max: Fury Road” – and delivered an absolutely brutal action highlight. The breathless cracker is on TV this Monday – without advertising.
It all started in the late 1970s. With a relatively small budget of $200,000, George Miller directed the dirty little apocalyptic film “Mad Max” and was not only able to bring in a sensational $100 million worldwide but also set the world career of Mel Gibson (“Braveheart”) in motion. A style-defining action board followed two years later with “Mad Max II”, while the reactions to “Mad Max 3” were more restrained.
A fourth part was actually supposed to follow in the 1980s, but it ultimately took until 2015 for George Miller to bring the “Mad Max” universe back to life on the big screen. However, the wait was more than worth it, because “Mad Max: Fury Road”, which will be broadcast on ZDF today, April 25, 2022, at 10:15 p.m., unabridged and without commercial breaks, is an absolute genre highlight.
This is what Mad Max: Fury Road is about
In a desolate desert landscape, where humanity has degenerated and almost everyone is willing to push themselves to the limit to just survive, live two misfits: Max (Tom Hardy), a man of action and fewer words, who, after the loss of his… wife and his child seeks peace of mind – and the elite Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a woman who takes action and believes that if she can make it from the desert to her homeland, she can ensure her survival.
Just when Max has decided he’s better off alone, he encounters a group in a battlewagon with Furiosa behind the wheel. The escapees, including Splendid (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) and other ex-slaves (Riley Keough, Zoe Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton), have escaped warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who is now after them – because women have become commodities and even more valuable than water and petrol. The confrontation between Immortan Joe’s gangs and fugitives leads to a dusty street war…
An action excess that you will never forget
The official DashFUN review gave “Mad Max: Fury Road” an outstanding 4.5 out of 5 stars. In his conclusion, author Carsten Baumgardt writes: “The road warrior Max Rockatansky is back after almost 30 years – and like Georges Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road‘ is a furious and daring action-excess for adrenaline junkies!”
This is quite surprising, because after a production history that was largely a disaster, George Miller, then 70 years old, managed to a truly breathtaking firework of action fire, which is burned into memory as a merciless frontal attack on all the senses and was ultimately even awarded six Oscars. In “Mad Max: Fury Road” only the brute rush of movement counts, the spoken word becomes a purely minor matter.
Of course, in order to develop such an effect, you also need an extremely fine feeling for pictures and sound. The first thing criticized is the pulsating junkie XL soundtrack that mercilessly drives “Mad Max: Fury Road” forward and never brings it to a standstill. It goes on to say: “Miller creates a symbiosis that is as curious as it is unique from the graphically exaggerated comic style of a ‘300‘ and virtuoso handcrafted old-school action. He always goes all the way to the stopover the top.”
It doesn’t matter that the plot thread is extremely thin because the extremely stylized staging and the presence of the actors (especially Charlize Theron, who is taking over the film more and more) leave “Mad Max: Fury Road” as “great, artfully composed and maximally rousing full-throttle action opera” shine. So if you haven’t seen the film yet, you should do so immediately – but don’t forget to buckle up!
