MAD MAX: DID I MISS SOMETHING?

Hmmm, even the poster likes Furiosa more than Max

Back in 2015 when the Oscar nominees were announced, I was surprised to see that George Miller's MAD MAX: FURY ROAD racked up 10 nominations (it would go on to win 6, all for technical things like editing).  When I posted about this on this blog, I dismissed the film  as "vastly overrated", and called Tom Hardy's lead role performance somnambulistic.  When SPOTLIGHT  went on to win Best Picture that year, I had no objection, thinking it a far superior and relevant film.
Recently, in the inevitable rush to summarize the last decade, various media outlets (like The AV Club online magazine) have been releasing  their lists of the best films of the decade.  And lo and behold, Fury Road has been topping or placing highly on many of them.  Now, I tend to agree with critical consensus over the ones made by the Academy over the years (I daresay that CITIZEN KANE has held up better than HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY!) , yet I really disagree with the critics regarding Fury Road.  While I generally liked the film, the notion that it's better than say, MOONLIGHT or SELMA seems crazy to me.  I could probably come up with one hundred films released in the last decade that I liked more than Fury Road.  Am I too out of  step?  Am I snob who dismisses it as "just" an action film? (Yes,  but that doesn't make me wrong!). Have the nation's film critics all been replaced by twelve year old fan boys, or did I miss something?  In the interest of being open minded, I have decided to watch the film again with as little bias as I can muster. I don't like to think that my opinions are written in stone, maybe there's more to the film than I thought.
First, some words about the Mad Max series in general: the first film was the debut feature of George Miller, an Australian born emergency room doctor who used actual motor related injuries he saw as inspiration for the film!  Starring a then unknown Mel Gibson, made for only around three hundred thousand dollars and shot mostly in semi legal fashion around the Australian outback, it became a worldwide cult hit.  Looked at years later, it holds up pretty well, especially in its opening scenes that sets up Miller's skill with a chase scene, not to mention his willingness to put his cast and  stunt people in some pretty precarious situations.  If the movie descends into standard issue action film cliches in it's later scenes (with post apocalyptic law man Max getting revenge on some evil  bikers after they kill his wife and child), it's still entertaining given its budget. Its success led to an inevitable sequel in 1982, MAD MAX 2: THE ROAD WARRIOR (released in America as just THE ROAD WARRIOR).  In my opinion, this film is the best in the series, as Miller, armed with a bigger budget, created even more impressive action scenes than the first, (the film's climax still stands as one of the best chase scenes ever)  while Gibson had grown to be far more comfortable on camera and used his natural onscreen charisma to good effect.  It would prove to be an even bigger hit than the first film, making an international star out of Gibson (which, looking back, may not have been  a good thing!).  Perhaps most interestingly for the series as a whole, THE ROAD WARRIOR was the first film to really lean into its post apocalyptic setting; in the first film, that setting was mostly a budget issue, and society overall still seemed to be functioning.  But in the second film, the world is a big ugly anarchic desert  with scarce resources full of road gangs willing to kill for those resources.  It was a bleak view of the future, one that Gibson's cynical mercenary character fit right into; he was not unlike the famous Man With No Name that Clint Eastwood played in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns of the 1960's.  The third film in the series, MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME, released in 1985, toned done that bleak view, and lightened up the main character, perhaps because of Gibson's increasing popularity, or to widen the audience appeal by getting a PG-13 rating.  The result was an almost maddeningly uneven film, with the first half having some of the best scenes in the series, and the second containing some of the worst.  The film opens with Max, alone again, stumbling into a society known as Bartertown, a ramshackle society run on methane and led by Auntie Em (played surprisingly well by Tina Turner).  The film's first half jettisons chase scenes and builds instead to a very exciting and well done man to man battle that finds Max and his towering opponent bouncing around on giant rubber bands in a huge dome.  Unfortunately, the film falls apart as Max encounters a group of annoying children in the desert, and the film ends with a chase scene that merely tries to rehash the climax of the second film with diminishing results.  It even ends with a ridiculous scene of Auntie Em letting Max go after wrecking half her army chasing him!
After the fourth film, director Miller would go on to make other films like 1987's THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK and 1998's BABE:PIG IN THE CITY  but he apparently never stopped thinking about returning to the Mad Max universe.  He tried to gear up production for one as early as 2001, but first the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and then the Iraq war affected the budget and locations, and he would instead make the animated film HAPPY FEET in 2006.  Finally, after years of storyboarding and delays, and the decision to recast the role of Max from the too old Gibson to Tom Hardy, Miller was finally able to start shooting in the African country of Nambia with a small army of crew and cast members, including olympic gymnasts and Cirque du Soleil members for the stunt scenes. After shooting for 120 days,  Miller's wife Margaret Sixel  took on the Herculean, months long task of editing the film's reported 480 hours of footage into a releasable film.  (She would win an Oscar for her troubles). 
Surprisingly, it only opened at #2 at the US box office (behind Pitch Perfect 2, if you can believe it!) and was only a moderate hit (around $150 million in America) considering its budget.  But critics and fan boys embraced it so strongly that it's reputation has swelled in social media, making it the opposite of the far more successful AVATAR, which has seen its reputation diminish over time despite being one of the biggest money making films ever.  Perhaps it plays better on TV and computer screens than the 3D effects heavy AVATAR.

Clearly there's some overlap

In many ways, Miller seemed to consciously make FURY ROAD as a  throwback to THE ROAD WARRIOR: the toned down violence of the third film is rejected to bring back the harder, R rated action of the second.  Story wise, we once  again, have a raspy voiced, hideously masked villain (the absurdly named Immortan Joe*) who leads a cult like group of bikers.  Again we have cynical wandering outsider Max encounter a society built in the chaos of the desert, focused around on rare resources (gas in the second film, water in the fourth).   And again, we see Max learn to respect and aid a group of renegades against that hideous cult leader.  And, or course, both films end with a smashing, crashing chase that features multiple vehicles and impressive stunts.  The big change in FURY ROAD is the addition of Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, who betrays Joe because of her disgust of his use of women as essentially breeding machines in his twisted little society. .  Theron is definitely the best thing about the film; she's no Wonder Woman with super powers, instead her strength is driven by her sense of righteousness and steely determination.  That determination give her action scenes an extra edge, since we are always aware of what she's fighting for and against, even when she's fighting Max himself.
Theron and her character are so good in this film, that it actually leads to the film's biggest flaw: she's  a better character than Max.  Unlike him, she has to carry off a major betrayal knowing full well that it will put her own life in danger, when she could have just gone along with Joe's corrupt society.  Max, on the other hand, just kinda shows up.  Seriously, he gets taken captive in the first scene and spends much of the first part of the film bound up while the story unfolds around him.   Personally, I found my interest in the film flagging every time the film cut away from Furiosa to catch up with our so called hero.  And even when Max inevitably starts to get involved in the story, much of the time he still seems almost tangential to what's going on, spending more time reacting than being active.  So here's a bold assertion:  Max shouldn't be in this film all.  I think a much better film could have been made with Furiosa being the main character that's just set in the Mad Max universe.  I think this not only because of Max's lack of connection to the plot, but also because of Tom Hardy's performance.  I already called Hardy somnambulistic in this film, and I stand by that statement.  Now, I wouldn't exactly call Mel Gibson's acting in the first three films great, but he was compelling and strong enough to carry the action.  Hardy often seems barely involved with what's going on around him; he grunts, points and looks bored throughout most of the film.  (Honestly, given the huge amount of footage that Miller and his wife had to edit for this film, one has to wonder how  Hardy could have been worse in the outtakes!  Did he burp in every shot?)  The weakness of Hardy is really displayed in a scene that clearly calls back to the second film:  In THE ROAD WARRIOR, late in the film, a bruised and battered Max declares that he will drive the huge tanker truck in the final chase.  It's a big moment for him, in that up to that point he has only shown self interest. but here he finally does the right thing, and Gibson plays it well, finally showing some humanity in his soft spoken delivery.  Conversely in FURY ROAD there is a moment when Max suggests to Furiosa and her compatriots that they could fool Joe and his army by doubling back.  Again, it shows Max doing the right thing for the first time in the film, but Hardy's mumbling, ridiculous line delivery kills it.  He's not exactly Mr Charisma! 

"Stop, this action scene is too exciting!"

Losing Max would also eliminate one of the other big flaws in the film; the bratty girl character that pops up randomly throughout the film.  Yes, every once in  a while, Max has a vision of a little girl that cynically chides him verbally.  Is this character supposed to add depth to Max?  To make him more human? If her insults are supposed to be somehow pushing Max into doing the right thing and helping Furiosa, why do they feel so random?  Why does he imagine the girl  showing up even after he's moved towards helping Furiosa?  Even worse, her presence stops the film's action dead in its tracks; great action scenes are about pacing and building to a big climax, not having some kid freeze things to a halt.  And there's never any explanation as to who this kid is: in the first film Max had a son who was still a toddler and no other children.  Some have theorized that she is one of the kids from the third film, although that hardly explains why Max would start thinking about her while he's in the  middle of a life and death car chase!
Ok, there are a lot of things in this film that I do like: although it's a repeat of The Humongous character in the  second film, the messiah like hold that Joe holds over his followers is interesting and well thought out, especially since Furiosa's rebelling over his treatment of women gives the film an anti patriarchy feminist kick.  I also like the idea of one of his Joe's men (Nux, well played by Nicholas Hoult) being able to break away from Joe, effectively showing that even good people can get caught up in a cult under the right conditions.  And yes, as much as the kid stopping them annoys me, the action scenes are undeniably exciting and the relentless pace of the film, which is almost all chase scenes, is impressive.  I do love the fact that most of the effects in the film were achieved without the usual CGI trickery, adding a realistic sense of danger and  excitement every time we see people hanging off of poles while riding on speeding vehicles.  But I still don't think anything here tops the ending of the second film. 
I went into what was my third viewing of this film after writing the first half of it, wondering if my opinion of the film would change after seeing it again.  The answer is no, I still think that it's a well made, sometimes exciting film that's partly sunk by a lame lead performance.  I still don't see how this movie, above all others, could be thought of as one of the best films of the last decade. 

*This may be off topic, but I would like to mention just how annoying I find all the silly names in this film series.  I mean: Toecutter, The Humongous, Master Blaster, Furiosa.   Are these film characters or professional wrestlers?