The important thing to keep in mind with Mad Max: Fury Road is that while it does what it does really well – it’s easily the best action film of the last few years, and you’d be struggling to find a better one this century – it only does a very limited amount of things. It’s not like you’re not warned either: right from the first scene we’re told that Max (Tom Hardy) is a loner in a brutal, terrifying world where all but the most basic of human emotions have been stripped away.
If you’re expecting comedy, or intricate plotting, or budding romance, or any of the other things we’ve grown to expect in what passes for action film-making as Hollywood tries to ensure there’s something for everyone in their hugely expensive blockbusters, you’ve come to the wrong barren wasteland. This purity of purpose – after the first 20 minutes or so of story the film boils down to one-armed warrior woman Furiosa (Charlize Theron) driving a truck away from various crazed maniacs while Max helps himself by helping her – is the kind of thing that’s extremely impressive in 2015: who knew you could stage a big budget spectacle that felt like an actual film, not a series of computer-generated explosions? That probably goes some way towards explaining a lot of the rave reviews the film’s been getting too. If you’re even remotely tired of the way most big deal Hollywood productions feel kind of bland around the edges (even Fast & Furious 7 got by on a handful of cool moments rather than actually being cool from go to whoa), then this most definitely feels like a blast of fresh air.
Once you go past the way this is fundamentally better made than every other action film in recent memory, you’re still left with a film that is really not much more than a 100 minute car chase (of varying speeds, mind you – director George Miller knows how to change up the pace to keep things thrilling) with a few snippets of plot at the beginning and end. It’s an awesome car chase, mind you, but that’s all it is. So it’s important at this stage, when the movie’s been out for a fortnight and the only people who haven’t seen it are the people who most likely weren’t going to bother but have heard at least some of the rave reviews out there, to make that point really clear: if you like what you’ve seen in the trailers, you should drive extremely quickly to the nearest cinema showing what will almost certainly be the best film you’ll see all year. But if you’re not interested in car chases, non-stop action, and a lot of maniacs going berserk, then Mad Max: Fury Road is not interested in you.