Reviewers heap praise on Mad Max: Fury Road

Reviewers have heaped praise on George Miller's new Mad Max film, Fury Road.

A sequel made for a 30-year-old trilogy by a 70-year-old director is being called "one of the best action movies ever made".

Mad Max: Fury Road is released this week in New Zealand, and it already has a 100 per cent approval rating on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes after 32 reviews.

The fourth film in George Miller's Mad Max series, Fury Road stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in a post-apocalyptic action-adventure that critics can't stop raving about.

The Hollywood Reporter called it a "madly entertaining new action extravaganza," while Forbes said it was "faster, bigger, badder, and better than anything else you'll see on screen in 2015".

More praise came from Hitfix, who called it a "stone-cold action master class," and Variety, which said: "'Worth the wait' still seems a puny response to the two hours of ferocious, unfettered B-movie bliss".

Associated Press called it "an exceptional, fearless and poetic masterpiece that's primed to become a modern classic".

In a five-star review, Time Out's David Ehrlich said the films was like watching "a tornado tearing through a tea party".

"Fury Road steers this macho franchise in a brilliant new direction, forging a mythical portrait about the need for female rule in a world where men need to be saved from themselves."

Perhaps the highest praise came from Movies.com's reviewer, who said Fury Road was "one of the best action movies ever made".

It's high praise for a film that launches in a year full of high-octane sequels, from Fast & Furious 7 to Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Hardy, who is attached for three more Mad Max films, has already talked up suggestions of a sequel, telling THR: "I have no shadow of doubt in my mind that we'll be going on again with this."

"It's a crazy sort of surreal and heightened world within George's head, which is fully transmuted and fleshed out now on a multi-million dollar level," Hardy told AP. "It's been sort of turbo-boosted. It's been blown into an ambitious orchestration of technicolor psychosis."

Miller says the long delay between Mad Max 3 and 4 didn't matter.

"This was a movie you couldn't kill with a stick," he says. "It just kept on wanting to be made and eventually it was."

- nzherald.co.nz with AP