Review: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ is hollow, meaningless action
Tom Hardy is Mad Max. (Golden Village Pictures)
Marcus Goh is a Singapore television scriptwriter. He’s also a Transformers enthusiast and avid pop culture scholar. He Tweets/Instagrams at Optimarcus and writes at marcusgohmarcusgoh.com. The views expressed are his own.
Secret ending? No.
Running time: 120 minutes (2 hours)
“Mad Max: Fury Road” is a post-apocalyptic action film and the fourth in the “Mad Max” franchise. It follows the adventures of the titular Max, as he strives to save a band of refugees and bring them home in a harsh and unforgiving desert. It stars Tom Hard (“Mad” Max), Charlize Theron (Furiosa), Nicholas Hoult (Nux), Hugh Keays-Byrne (King Immortan Joe), and Rosie Huntington-Whitely (Angharad)
“Mad Max: Fury Road” is a confusing beast of a movie. Perhaps it’s because of the hype leading up the movie that we have such high expectations of the end result. It doesn’t quite deliver the way you’d expect it to, and it comes across as a complete disappointment. But was it a victim of its own hype? Not quite - rather, it’s a victim of poor storytelling and characterisation.
King Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). (Golden Village Pictures)
Highlights
Detailed sets, vehicles & costumes
It’s obvious that a great deal of work was put into the world building for “Mad Max: Fury Road,” given that even the smallest glove is given exquisite detail. It’s completely fathomable that every prop in the movie has its own backstory that shapes its current form, and this lends a strong sense of verisimilitude to the story. It might be a strange and unbelievable world, but at least it remains universally consistent.
Well choreographed action sequences
The range of action goes beyond mere explosions (although even those are brilliantly executed) - there are physical stunts, vehicular combat, and tense artillery sequences. Combined with the insane level of detail put into the props and vehicles, and you get engaging and engrossing action scenes. It’s a pity that there’s no character motivation on which to hang the stakes for each conflict, otherwise the action scenes would have been truly flawless.
Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is furious. (Golden Village Pictures)
Letdowns
Jaundiced orange and icy blue colour correction
Did a colour blind editor combed through the film and reduced all colours to two shades - desert orange and night blue? It might be a stylistic choice, but it’s an aesthetically terrible one. Not only does it rob you of the chance to properly appreciate the careful detail by the set designers, it also prevents you from ever fully suspending your disbelief and hence, immersion to the story. The world isn’t so exaggeratedly blue and orange, and neither should any movie reflect it as such.
Non-action scenes are horribly pretentious
With lines like “hope is a mistake,” or needlessly pointless ideological debates between characters to show how intelligent the movie is, or even the ridiculously highbrow violin score during the resting scenes, any scene that isn’t action simply tries to hard to be clever. The problem is that it’s not, and the effort is embarrassingly transparent. The movie needs to know what it’s good at and focus on it, rather than waddling on like the deformed chimera it currently is.
Lack of characterisation
The problem with all the characters is that they only have one defining, extreme trait. There’s no attempt to create any other dimension to the characters, resulting in flat caricatures that act more as glorified drivers than real people. Without any chance to empathise or relate to the characters, what you have is a series of explosive events with no heart or soul to their purpose.
A desperate Furiosa. (Golden Village Pictures)
Without a compelling motivation or even a sense of backstory for the protagonists, you might know who to root for but not why. This results in hollow, meaningless action because there are no stakes involved - even if the battle is lost, does it have an impact on the story? Therein lies the greatest flaw in “Mad Max: Fury Road” - the lack of a good story to propel the furious action forward.
Should you watch this at weekday movie ticket prices? No.
Should you watch this for free? No.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” opens in cinemas 14 May, 2015 (Thursday).
