Mad Max: Fury Road Blu-ray Review
As Donnie Darko could tell you, it’s a mad world we live in.
Still, I’m pretty sure Max Rockatansky would trade his mad world for ours, which is beyond any of the ordinary insanity we know.
I understand it’s also beyond something known as a Thunderdome.
George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road reboot has all the ingredients fans have come to love and expect from this aussie director’s cult Road Warrior franchise.
Barren wasteland set in a post apocalyptic world?
Check?
Angry, lone wolf dude hellbent on restoring some order to the lawless land he finds himself in?
Check.
Souped up muscle cars driven to destruction as the few remaining survivors search for anything resembling civilisation.
Check.
In fact, there’s not much new to see in this latest Hollywood reboot, and yet you won’t see anything else like this all year.
Mad Max: Fury Road has a simple plot. Tom Hardy’s feral incarnation of Max is on the run, from the madness he encounters at every turn and some unspeakable trauma buried in his past.
Unfortunately, it turns out Max can’t even outrun a bunch of warboys that patrol the bleak world he now exists in.
Manacled and gagged, our road warrior is brought back to said warboys’ home, where his o negative blood type will come in handy.
But no sooner has Max been strung up, and he’s on the move again.
A group of comely lasses who were the property of some fearsome looking warlord called Immortan Joe have decided they don’t much care for being someone’s possession. So they set off for pastures new lead by Imperator Furiosa, who most definitely sounds like some self-appointed african dictator type, but is actually a one-armed Charlize Theron.
So everyone jumps in their muscle mobiles and heads out into the desert to get Joe’s girls back for him, and some crazy warboy straps Max to the front of his war machine so he can mainline the mad fella’s blood straight into his veins.
Is everyone getting this so far?
Naturally, it doesn’t take long for all hell to break loose on what i presume is the appropriately named Fury Road, or for max to break free from his captors and band together with the harem formerly known as Joe’s as they try to out run the Immortan one.
Mad Max: Fury Road does exactly what it says on the blu-ray tin.
There’s a guy called Max in it, and he’s mad. There’s also a road where a furious battle takes place.
And if you paid attention to this surprise blockbuster of the summer, there were plenty of furious petrol-head fanboys out there too – all because the excellent Charlize Theron upstages their Mad Max demi-god.
But then I’d expect nothing else from a bunch of insecure man-children, often called Jeremy, who’s love of big, powerful cars is in no way an attempt to compensate for something else that is neither big nor powerful.
Mad Max: Fury Road doesn’t have these problems. It’s the biggest film you’ll see this year, and the sights and sounds transfer pretty well to the small screen.
It’s kind of hard to get bored of a mad metal guitarist cranking out flaming guitar solo’s atop of some souped up war machine.
The most amazing thing about Mad Max: Fury Road though is the amount of CGI used, which is hardly any.
Most of the special features for this blu-ray version show you just how mad George Miller and the crew he assembled had to get to make his 21st century road warrior film this way.
But that’s what made this new Mad Max installment the action film to see this year, and you’d be mad to miss out on it.
Jonathan Campbell