Review of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) by Jdb26354 — 15 May 2015

Up front, I enjoyed it. Puts the Fast and Furious movies to complete shame. And I enjoyed the original too. It’s an entertaining series, and we’ve got some worthy new lead actors to carry the story forward. Kudos to the production.

However, I’m shooting for the tires of all those “10” ratings out there.

First, the movie is essentially a car (truck) chase, which makes it difficult to give dynamic range to the drama – it’s always on pretty loud.

Second, the performances are good given this context, but hardly stand as masterpieces of character acting.

Third, let’s keep our powder dry and acknowledge that 8 or 9 is a worthy score for this movie. If you give Fury Road a 10, what does Raging Bull, or The Godfather Part II, or, if you want to stick to sci-fi, Inception or The Terminator, deserve? Or, if you want a bizarre, violent chase out of the Western genre, what does The Good, The Bad and The Ugly get, if this is a 10?

Fourth, the action-heavy and dialogue-light nature of this genre – and this is a genre film – leaves you with few memorable lines. Without that, it is harder to have memorable scenes. How do we build a shared shorthand around this “classic”? Do we use phrases like “the scene where he got the mask off his face” or “when Max gave her the gun because she was the better shot”? It is not impossible, but it is difficult.

So, go to this movie and enjoy its entertainment value, but let’s not elevate too many comics to classics.