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

I really, truly do not understand how this movie is getting rave reviews. It's basically a 2-hour long trailer. I'm still waiting for a story to begin. I like simple, entertaining action movies (Shogun Assassin, any late 70's zombie movie, The Warriors), but this was a gratuitously long music video for a clown playing one guitar chord.

Within the first 3 minutes I kept asking myself "Why is this artificially sped up?" My hunch was that the old movies (which I haven't seen) did that. Later research confirmed this. This was probably a cool effect back in the 70s, but in the post-Transformers world of barely-coherent editing in action sequences, it just makes things so much worse.

Other than Max, each character's name is uttered maybe once, amidst screaming and car crashing, so I didn't know anyone's name until I looked it up later.

Almost all of the eleven lines in this movie are delivered with the melodramatic heft of a Spanish soap opera. I laughed at most of them. No one else in the theater did, which alarmed me. I think I counted 20 words from Max's mouth. His brow is furrowed the entire time.

This movie is described as "ultra-violent", yet if you take out 3 or 4 of the shots with blood, it's mostly pale dudes bouncing off of cars for 2 hours. It's more like a live-action Looney Tunes flick. Could have definitely gotten a PG-13 if desired, but that probably wouldn't have been edgy enough.

Seriously, just a few scenes of dialogue could have established the world, and the problems, but the opening narration is just "i am max. I run and stuff." I've dropped into other franchises with sequels first and never felt like I was missing a wealth of knowledge and unable to understand their world. Mad Max's world makes no sense to me, which again, is fine and a decision on behalf of the creators. But you need to give me SOME reason why characters are making the inane decisions that they do, otherwise everyone comes across as purely stupid.

I fell asleep during the last 20 minutes, so I'm not sure how it ended and I don't really care.

The effects are quite good (minus the fast-forward effect), and some of the set pieces are really cool. I dug the intro action sequence (though it basically never ends). The music is literally one symphonic swell with a palm-muted guitar chord over it.