The interesting thing about “Mad Max” (1980) is that Max is only mad for a few scenes at the end of the film. Talk about a slow buildup. It’s a cheaply made, poorly acted, abysmally edited cross between a police procedural and a sci-fi flick. And don’t get me started about the sound editing. It’s full-bore, Spaghetti Western quality (who knew Australian needed to be dubbed into English?). All that adds up to the perfect B movie, which is why it was such a cult classic, why it spawned a big-budget franchise and why it made Mel Gibson a star.
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OK, so Mel Gibson is a High Plains Drifter with glam-rocker hair in Australia, where the NFL sent all its shoulder pads as some kind of post-apocalyptic tax writeoff. Mel gets bushwacked a couple of times and ends up in Lord of the Flies Co-Starring Eminem, except the kids head for the O.K. Corral Co-Starring Tina Turner. Only then does The Man With No Name turn into a Road Warrior movie, complete with dwarf tossing and car chases designed by Rube Goldberg. None of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (1985) makes any sense, but then again, neither did the first two.
If you are an adolescent male who is into comic books and video games and all that crap, “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) is for you. The fact that I referred to those trappings as “all that crap” identifies me as someone to whom this film did not appeal. I would have been better off watching the original “Mad Max” or perhaps even “The Gauntlet” instead. The coarsening of society is reflected in the coarsening of movie reboots. This is a blood-splatteringly ugly movie with a thin story, enough to keep me vaguely interested, but not enough to truly care.
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