Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

4 outta 5

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road which may or may not be a prequel to two other Mad Max movies. It doesn’t quite have the visceral drive that Fury Road did, as this isn’t about going on a single ride and more about following a character across years. Also, while Fury Road would only show glimpses of the larger world of the post-apocalyptic Wasteland, this movie delves more into the different societies that live there. As with all the Mad Max films, the extended action scenes are great, although this may be the darkest movie in the Mad Max series, and that is saying something. As the credits roll there’s brief clips from Fury Road (to tell how the prequel story ends) intercut throughout. And it is not great when after the exceptional Furiosa showing Fury Road clips serves to remind the audience how fantastic the last movie was.

In the verdant Green Place, a rare site of natural resources in the post-Apocalyptic Wasteland, lives the kid Furiosa (Alyla Browne) with her people and her mother (Charlee Fraser). But one day she is kidnapped by the resource stealing minions of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and her mother is killed. Furiosa is dragged by Dementus in his conquests, and eventually they make it to the fortress of the Citadel, home to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his gang of War Boys. Furiosa leaves Dementus and stays at the Citadel but, unfortunately, Joe and his sons take a liking to her, so she spends the next few years laboring in the workshops of the Citadel pretending to be a mute boy. Now adult Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) goes on a mission with Immortan Joe’s giant transport the War Rig, and she assists the driver, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). Over the years, Dementus has taken over several cities in the Wasteland working with Joe, but now is spiraling towards a confrontation between the forces of Dementus and the forces of Immortan Joe, and Furiosa could finally get her revenge against the man who killed her mother.

Charlize Theron was so fantastic as Furiosa in Fury Road, that it’s quite a challenge to live up to her intensity. While Taylor-Joy is great at picking up the baton, and she is prominent in all the ads, Adult Furiosa is only in half of the film. The half the movie has the kid Furiosa basically being passed around various Wasteland adults as she looks for opportunities to escape. It is actually incredibly dark when Furiosa’s mother saves her, but they get captured and the kid has to watch her mother get tortured. This is a series that often has dark moments, the very first Mad Max movie has his wife and kid run down by the bad guy, but Furiosa having to witness her mother’s demise is up there. Also the way that Immortan Joe and his son are leering after the kid is rather off putting. Even though Dementus killed Furiosa’s mom, he makes her his daughter, even giving her a stuffed animal that used to belong to his own kids. Taylor-Joy as Adult Furiosa has the simmering intensity that Theron had, and her final confrontation with Dementus is very dramatic.

The politics of the Citadel and the other cities like Gastown and Bullet Farm are elaborated on here. In Fury Road, the cities were mentioned offhandedly, that’s where all the goons chasing after Max and Furiosa were coming from. It’s the names like Gastown and Bullet Farm that convey a lot about how these cities work in relation to the mechanics of The Wasteland. Eventually, Dementus ends up taking over for these places which gives him another level of power. Hemsworth is great as Dementus because Hemsworth just totally looks like a guy who has come out of the Mad Max world, and he gets to be menacing and dopey all at once. There’s a lot of layers in his performance as even at moments a crazed Wasteland kingpin like him can still show brief flashes of the broken human inside as he mentions the people he lost. There is a new actor playing Immortan Joe in this film and he seems slightly less crazy than he was in Fury Road, and the voice is not as intimidating. Burke plays Praetorian Jack but it’s kind of hard to tell he is a new character as he looks, sounds, and even his costume is like Mel Gibson’s Mad Max from the original trilogy, and he even references himself being a Road Warrior. There is a small moment between him and Furiosa that may seem like a romantic bit, or maybe they were just concussed, but Dementus breaks it off.

As happens in a Mad Max film, the action is superlative. It doesn’t have the constant chase intensity that permeated Fury Road, but there is a wide variety here. Furiosa’s mom chasing after her daughter is basically a sniper scene. The bit when Furiosa is hanging from underneath the War Rig has multiple baddies literally flying at the truck. When Dementus tries to sneak his own men into Gastown, he needs to make the chase believable, so he starts shooting his own men. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga may fill in backstory plot points that weren’t really needed, but when it settles into doing cool Mad Max stuff it is awesome.