958. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult

Director: George Miller

Running Time: 120 mins

Mad Max: Fury Road is an American film and the fourth in the Mad Max series. Years into the post-apocalypse, Max, running scared from an evil tyrant who rules the desert with an iron fist, joins forces with Furiosa, a strong-willed woman looking to return to her homeland, in order to bring down the tyrant and restore order to this mad world.

What an insane film! Unlike the disappointing Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and more like the first two movies, this takes the craziness to a brilliantly high level. With constant mind-blowing and explosive action throughout, epic visual effects and cinematography, and a pretty exciting story too, this is an absolute thrill ride that can’t be missed.

The main thing about this film is that it is totally and utterly insane, but deliberately. You see how severe this apocalypse has been by the way that everybody’s just gone completely out of their mind, making for a world of total madness and insanity.

The fact that this film approaches this insanity with a good sense of humour, to the extent where you see a guy with no eyes playing a double guitar that shoots flames out of it whilst in battle, this film is quite simply a hell of a lot of fun to watch, however the drama and excitement in the story is not at all cheapened by that.

This film has a very simple plot, being set around what is effectively a two-hour car chase across the desert, but the success here is that it manages to bring in proper drama and intrigue for its main characters along the way. Max, played excellently by Tom Hardy, is as enigmatic as ever, and although he doesn’t have the sense of extreme anger like the first three films, he’s still a solid action hero that you always want to support.

However, the stand-out character here is by far Imperator Furiosa, who claims what is effectively the position of main character, being the one whose ambition and drive pushes the entire story along, whilst she’s also a very strong, and totally badass action heroine, thanks to a brilliant performance by Charlize Theron.

One of the best parts of this film is the visuals and the on-screen vibe that it gives off. The special effects, both practical and CGI, are stunning to behold, whilst the cinematography of the action sequences throughout is flawless, taking a very simple approach to filming the fight scenes that makes it much easier to watch than a generic shaky-cam look.

This is also the first Mad Max film where you get the vibrant colours of the desert world shining through. In Mad Max 2, there’s a little bit of that, however this film is simply beautiful to look at, whether it’s at the wide golden landscape shots of the vast desert or the gloomier, bluer night scenes that add to the eeriness and tension of the story even more.

Overall, this gets an 8.2, because of its fantastically exciting story, strong characters and performances, stunning visuals and the sheer insanity that prevails throughout.