Among other things, Mad Max: Fury Road became notable for being the first entry of George Miller's Australian dystopian action franchise to feature a new hero alongside the titular character played by Mel Gibson in the original trilogy and Tom Hardy in Fury Road. This new cleanser of evil in the Wasteland is named Furiosa (Charlize Theron)-an elite driver with a mechanical arm and buzzcut who is intent on liberating the people from the tyrannical reign of her employer Immortan Joe (the late Hugh Keays-Byrne). Courtesy of Theron's excellent performance and all of the acclaim Fury Road received, Furiosa became an instant fan favorite character. Given all of the love directed her way, Miller decided to make his next trip to the Mad Max universe an exploration of how Furiosa became the badass revolutionary the world met in Fury Road with an epic origin story entitled Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Miller takes the viewer back damn near to the beginning of everything in the opening sequence where a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is abducted near her home "the Green Place"-which is one of the few remaining places where agriculture and water can thrive in this barren world-by the underlings of a sadistic biker gang leader named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Dementus eventually kills Furiosa's mother (Charlee Fraser) and trades her off to the warlord Immortan Joe in exchange for control of Gastown and a weekly increase in supplies. As she grows older, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) escapes the clutches of Immortan Joe's stable of wives by disguising herself as a mute boy and becomes a skilled driver/mechanic while working on his war rigs. Her increased precision behind the wheel and responsibility on the team under the tutelage of Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) sends her on a collision course with the increasingly power-hungry Dementus-which presents her with the golden opportunity to enact revenge for her mother's death and do the one thing she wants more than anything to world: the chance to go home.
Tracing Furiosa's path to becoming a hardened revolutionary back to its tragic beginning does a lot to explain the motivations of the character we saw in Fury Road. While this is helpful for people who wanted further context as to why Furiosa was so committed to overthrowing Immortan Joe's oppressive regime in the previous film, it also exposes the limits of Miller's fast-and-loose approach to mythmaking in the Mad Max universe. Look, it's great to have a franchise where the continuity is flexible, and knowledge of decades worth of lore isn't a requirement to understand or enjoy the film. The problem here is that the drawbacks of employing such a laid-back approach can be regularly felt when the narrative comes into focus.
The inevitable tie-in's to Fury Road are often baffling thanks to the stern, quietly evil version of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) that appears here feeling like a completely different character than the cartoonishly over-the-top dictator that Keays-Byrne portrayed him as and a timeline that feels considerably earlier than that film even in its later stages until the final moments which directly set up its plot.
The confused nature of Furiosa doesn't stop at the Fury Road callbacks. Structurally, the story feels more like a rough outline than a final draft. Miller has a clear emotional hook in its harrowing opening sequence where Furiosa is taken from home and watches her mother get killed right in front of her and an epic final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus where every ounce of repressed rage and catharsis that you want in a revenge story comes pouring out in incendiary fashion. Nearly everything between these fully realized bookends (especially after Furiosa ends up in the hands of Immortan Joe) is a hodgepodge of loosely connected skits that are so poorly developed and bad at conveying elapsed time that they often feel completely random. Ultimately, Furiosa becomes the woman that we know her to be, but I'm not sure that hinting at this allegedly transformative mentor/vaguely romantic relationship she had with a war rig driver (Burke) in a few scenes and showing how she got her arm ripped off conveys anything important about her journey from scared, grieving young girl torn from her home by warlords to the woman who put her life on the line for the chance to liberate so many other kids from suffering the same fate as her.
There is, however, a great time-tested antidote to choppy storytelling that Furiosa makes liberal use of: great action and acting. Miller puts together a considerably more dynamic collection of setpieces than the "drive big trucks with flaming guitar players attached to them in a straight line for 2 hours shit that occupied Fury Road with more shootouts and elaborate stuntwork accompanying the series signature vehicle chase sequences, Hemsworth's depraved carnival barker act as the aspiring dictator Dementus operates in the weirdo character actor register that is probably the most interesting, underutilized skill in his performing arsenal and unlike whatever the hell was going on with the sedated, serious version of Immortan Joe, Taylor-Joy's quietly fierce performance channels the same energy that Theron brought to the character. Furiosa only lives up to its potential as a hard-boiled desert revenge tale when its laser focused on Furiosa's quest to kill Dementus and displaying the thirst these sadistic men to control the dwindling assets of a dying world along with the violence that comes with it, so kudos to Miller for cooking up the most elaborate setpieces he's ever made at nearly 80 years old and Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy for giving the film exact juxtaposition of conflicting emotions it needed for its basic revenge narrative to work.
Furiosa is neither an essential nor disastrous continuation of the Mad Max series. Although a frustratingly uneven picture on the whole, it really sings when it works, and the big action moments popped in Dolby like few films do. With it looking very likely that this will be Miller's final ride in the Wasteland, he should take a tremendous amount of pride in the odd behemoth of a post-apocalyptic world that he was able to build over the past 45 years and that he was able to avoid the doomed fates of so many other iconic franchises by stretching it out to the point where it ultimately ended on a sour note. There is only 1 Mad Max and film history will never forget that.
Grade: B
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