The character of Furiosa in 2015′s remarkable Mad Max: Fury Road made the titular wandering warrior of the dystopian wastelands look quite sane or mild-mannered by comparison. Clearly, she’d had a tough life – the clawed prosthetic arm was a bit of a giveaway. So was the withering stare, the buzzcut, the forehead slathered in black oil, her way behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler battle-rig. Her bid to save a harem of women from villain Immortan Joe, a man whose gene pool had a few bugs floating in it but who ruled “The Citadel”, was Fury Road’s main plot.
As portrayed by Charlize Theron, Furiosa helped stop the film being just another afterthought franchise reboot. But while she was in the thick of the action, the star of Fury Road was the action itself. The film’s breathless pace and the world in which director George Miller staged it made it a juggernaut freakshow version of the post-apocalyptic Outback, which he introduced in his original 1979-85 trilogy. That was before he made films about talking piglets (Babe) and penguins (Happy Feet).
Now, the character returns in a prequel and origin story that is the first Max-less Mad Max movie and one that demands we be Furiosa-curious. A mildly impressive Anya Taylor-Joy and her own withering gaze eventually turn up as the adult character. That’s after the first third of the movie tells of her unfortunate childhood, where she’s played by Alyla Browne. She’s kidnapped from a verdant idyll by crusty bikers and made a surrogate daughter to their warlord, Dementus. He’s played by Chris Hemsworth, unrecognisable behind an Uluru-sized honker and adenoidal Aussie accent, in an OTT performance.
Almost half an hour longer than Fury Road and delivered in episodes with enigmatic chapter headings (“The Pole of Inaccessibility”) with an ending that feels like a multichoice question, it’s a film that is often spinning its tyres in the sands of indulgence. Yes, there is plenty of mad action, some of it harking back to scenes from the 80s movies, some back to Ben-Hur – Dementus drives a chariot of choppers.
Even with all that, the action doesn’t have quite the same bite as Fury Road. In that film, it was hard to tell the actual from the digital. That’s not the same here. Still, there are plenty of whiplash-inducing chases across the dunes and battles in various industrial strongholds.
For a film where rampant violence is a given, it does have a nastier, more sadistic streak than its predecessor. It’s also keener on biblical and political allusions and makes time for a few seconds of chaste romance between Furiosa and Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), a big-rig driver for the Citadel who recognises a damaged kindred spirit. But the body-strewn, smoking wreckage-filled course of true love never did run smooth.
Yes, it’s all a bit more complicated than last time, which at least shows it’s trying to be more than just the same film under a different title, even if it’s mostly stuck on the same highway to hell.
Rating out of 5: ★★★★
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, directed by George Miller, is in cinemas now.
