Grade: B-
Before seeing Mad Max: Fury Road, I could have taken in all the previous Mad Maxes as an appetizer, but I chose not to. MM:FR is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, so I wanted to see if it was strong enough to stand alone. Could somebody like me, who had never been exposed to any of the movies in this series, come in to this one “cold,” having received little to no backstory or context? For a Best Picture nominee, you should be able to, but the answer here is a disappointing “not really.” From the beginning, I felt like I walked in late and missed the exposition. However, director George Miller literally cuts to the chase quickly, and it got better and better for me. I can’t praise the technical elements enough. I don’t think you’ll find better action sequences in any movie this past year. They are unrealistic, ridiculous, yet come off as entertainingly as a well-choreographed hellish post-apocalyptic Cirque du Soleil show. Conveniently-sized sand dunes populate the desert off to the side of the road to act as ramps for a seemingly endless parade of bad guys on motorcycles to zoom up off them (individually – always one-by-one) in an attempt to catch up to our heroes. The good guys climb down and do mechanical work on the underside of their rig while traveling at top speed. And my favorite: we assume the music we hear is just part of the score, but then a rig is revealed to us with villains banging on drums in the back with a Satanic electric guitar player wailing away up front, like the support band from hell. It is my favorite example of messing with non-diegetic music in film since Blazing Saddles. [Remember when the main theme played, and then we were suddenly shown the full orchestra playing it in the middle of the wild west?] The locations, cinematography, and score (yes, some of it IS diegetic) are stunning. This is an attractive movie to behold. By the end, in a morbid way, I felt uplifted and pumped up, like when I first saw Con Air. You are not going to get much information in the way of plot or character development, but if you realize this, surrender to it, and turn your brain off for two hours, there’s some fun to be had here.
Grade: B-
Film Reviews by Mark 
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