Upon receiving word of his wife’s death and the army
marching on his gates, Macbeth famously lamented that life itself was nothing
more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing.” I return to this quotation every once in a while because it is, as so
much of Shakespeare’s dialogue, incredibly poetic and deftly precise in
expressing something ineffable about the human condition. And I can’t help
feeling that Macbeth might have had a similar – if pronouncedly less fatalistic
– reaction to George Miller’s Mad Max:
Fury Road, which has heretofore been hailed as one of the greatest action
films of the past year, if not of all time. To which I have to ask – did we all see the same movie? Because I didn’t see a movie that merits being labeled the #1 film of 2015, as more than a dozen critics have done. The movie I saw was a tale competently told by a very capable director, full of so much sound and fury they put it in the title and the name of a main character, ultimately signifying very little beyond its surface. It is far from distressingly poor, but it is certainly underwhelming after all of the hype.
Carrying a negligible connection to the Mel Gibson trilogy of yesteryear, the film finds the eponymous Max (Tom Hardy) along for the ride when Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) stages a breakout for the wives of warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). What ensues is a chaotic, frenetic, and seemingly endless chase across the barren wasteland of the apocalypse.
First of all, I don’t mind that the film is an extended chase sequence. As I said at the top of the review, the action scenes are very competently directed, and I give Miller a tip of the hat for managing to do much of it with practical effects and to keep a suitable level of tension even when the scenes become a tad protracted. (Kudos also to Junkie XL, who wears his Hans Zimmer homage on his sleeve with a score that smacks of Man of Steel.) The problem I have with the action sequences is that there really are too many of them at the same level of intensity to the point where I became desensitized fairly quickly. I wasn’t bored, although I did feel a certain languorous sensation after seeing someone run over by enormous tires for the ninth time. Miller has a wonderful bag of tricks in the first few “episodes” of car chases, but as the film continues to do the same stunts Fury Road loses something of its original feeling.
The film has a very specific rhythm, episodic in its approach to narrative repetition but ultimately cyclical because, yes, at one point in the chase they do turn around and head back the way they came, which maybe feels more like a metaphor for the film than Miller intended. We’re driving and we’re stopping, then we’re driving and we’re stopping, and by about the third go-round of this pattern Fury Road felt a bit like its own greatest-hits compilation.
Two comparisons here, the first of which is to the superlative Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, particularly the tank chase sequence. The reason that sequence stands out is because it’s unique; it does a number of things that the film hadn’t done and wouldn’t do again, and it does them all particularly well with a fantastic sense of peril even though we know there’s really no chance that Indy will meet a crunchy fate. Imagine, though, a film comprised of four or five tank sequences, turned up way past eleven, and with Tom Hardy’s monosyllabic grunts in lieu of the charisma of Harrison Ford, and you have something approximately like Fury Road. Again, there’s something to enjoy there, but I’m flabbergasted at the number of critics who put this at #1 of all of 2015.
Next, Pacific Rim. Now I know what you’re going to say – “This again?” Well, yes, and Mad Max: Fury Road is decidedly not Pacific Rim, thank heavens. But it does many things in common with Pacific Rim, which I find problematic in terms of getting me engaged as an audience member. Fury Road’s characters are largely archetypical, compared to Pacific Rim’s gross stereotypical figures. You have Max, who’s the good guy because he’s the good guy; Furiosa, the Strong Female Character whose motivations are to do the right thing because It’s The Right Thing; and Immortan Joe, the evil one-percenter who’s bad because he’s Bad. (Compare to Pacific Rim’s cliché Mako Mori, a Japanese woman skilled in the art of war to avenge her family, or the pigeonholed effete British scientist with a limp.) What I think resonates with Fury Road more than Pacific Rim, though both are essentially onomatopoetic, is that primal storytelling which relies on archetypes (the same reason The Force Awakens struck a chord). It is, however, extremely thin archetypal storytelling.
Why is it, though, that I felt physically enervated at the end of Whiplash but otherwise emotionless when the credits rolled on Fury Road? Again, I wasn’t as invested in Max and Furiosa as some of my friends and fellow critics have become. It was very much a sense of, “Oh, that’s it?” Quite honestly, I got quantitatively the same emotional rush from the trailer for Fury Road as I did from the full film, in about a single percentage of the time. It left me feeling a bit empty, as if Miller had relied on my complicity in the mutually agreed-upon coolness of the film. Yes, things do blow up, and I’m as big a fan of explosions as the next guy (who happens to be my father, in this case), but the charm wears off after the fourteenth car explodes after flipping over an indecent amount of times.
It’s competently made, but let’s not fall over ourselves in praising Mad Max: Fury Road. There is something very alchemical when a movie works and when it doesn’t, and for me Fury Road just wasn’t the transcendent experience I’d been led to expect. If we can revise a phrase from Shakespeare once more, it’s not exactly much ado about nothing, but it strikes me that Fury Road is a very loud amount of ado about very little.
