Fury Road review

The new Mad Max movie is called Fury Road. The main character (other than Max) is called Furiosa. That’s about as much effort as anyone put into writing this movie. It’s one of those movies that’s monumentally stupid, but at the same time, thinks it’s much smarter than its audience. In one of the first scenes in the movie, main baddie Immortan Joe proclaims that he is going to get gas from Gas Town and bullets from the Bullet Farms. Because where else would you get your gas and bullets? Don’t tell me I’m the only guy who had to schlep down to Video Game City when Witcher 3 came out. Later in the movie, Furiosa tells her comrades that they are being chased by “bullet farmers – they come from the Bullet Farm”. That is where bullet farmers would come from, I suppose.

Sometimes, lines are just repeated over and over: a doctor tells Immortan Joe that were it not for some tragic turn of events, he would’ve had a completely healthy baby boy, “perfect in every way”. Immortan Joe’s son then proceeds to shout to everyone that he was going to have a brother – “perfect in every way”. After Immortan Joe discovers that his wives ran away, one rebellious worker tells him that they are not his property. Shortly afterwards, one of his soldiers tells another that someone stole some of Joe’s “stuff”. “What stuff?” the other soldier asks. “His women!” Did you get that Immortan Joe treats women like property yet?

That minor plot point is probably why so many people say this movie is feminist, which is funny given that one of the first things we see in this movie is the mostly nameless and quiet female cast hosing each other down in their skimpy white robes. You might as well claim that a strip club is feminist because it exclusively features women, and as I write these words, I sadly realize that there are probably people out there who would subscribe to this logic. No, this movie has women for the same reason it has trucks covered in spikes and guitars that spit out flames: to be awesome for the bros. It has the same target audience as Furious 7, but it takes itself way too seriously to be anywhere near as charming or fun.

As long as we’re on the subject, given that this is a post-apocalyptic world where even basic commodities are hard to come by, is a flame-spitting guitar really the best thing to spend our resources on? I’m just saying, maybe we wouldn’t have such a gas crisis if we didn’t waste gallons of the stuff just trying to look cool.

Potential jokes about government spending aside, this is what the entire movie is like: it spent so much money trying to look cool that it forgot that a movie might need stuff like a story, or relatable characters, although given the reviews it’s getting, everyone else forgot that as well. There’s barely any dialogue in this movie, and even the little dialogue it has is mostly dumb exposition like the lines quoted above. At other times it tries to hint at something of a setting with lines full of unexplained terms like “he’s a smeg who eats schlanger” – did George Lucas write this? – but nothing ever comes of it. Wait though, maybe we’ll find out more about this world in the Mad Max third-person open-world shooting game™ (because we simply don’t have enough of those) coming out September 1^st! I’ll make sure to play that never!

Honestly, if you told me this movie was made just to sell video games to 14-year-old boys, I’d believe you. It’s probably going to work, too. Hell, it sorta worked on me – I couldn’t wait to go back to playing Witcher 3 while I was watching this movie. In the words of Immortan Joe: “Mediocre!”