Tough Mudder-funster? 'Fury Road' reviewed...

Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) lost his family in the desolate wastelands of an Earth, where water and power have quickly become the most sought-after commodities. He is captured by the tribe that is ruled over by Immortan Joe (High Keays-Byrne). He has a stranglehold on water, literally milks some of his subjects for their milk and has a harem of beauties from which he wishes to spawn a new generation of elite.  With Max's universal blood-type, he's spared as 'spare-parts', but when Joe's right-hand woman Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) betrays him whisking away his brides in search of a distant greener pastures, most of Joe's mountain-side citadel sets off in pursuit, dragging Max along with them. 

And that, in a nutshell and crankshaft, is all you need to know about the much-anticipated Max Max: Fury Road reboot from the franchise's original auteur George Miller. Think Russell Mulcahy's Duran Duran video 'Wild Boys' writ large and drunk with a barrel of moonshine and a whiskey chaser..

What Michael Bay does for unsoiled chrome and jailbait flesh, Miller does for rust and dust and the resulting film is less a coherent epic and more of a 'Jeremy Clarkson has an acid trip en route to the Burning Man festival' where you crank up the soundtrack to '11', breath in the exhaust fumes and slam your foot so hard on the accelerator that you threaten to push it straight through the chasse.

One can imagine an Arnie-vehicle punctuating such a blockbuster with one-liners, quips and banter, but this visually-led saga proves to have one of the most sparse scripts for a mainstream movie in recent memory, dialogue being kept to a minimum throughout. The over-revved engines and fuming exhausts doing much of the talking, and - with the exception of an initial enigmatic exposition-fueled monologue at the very beginning - it's a good half hour before Hardy's Max says anything above a few annoyed grunts and mutterings. 

The sheer 'over-the-topness' of everything might worry those who've battled against succumbing to the over-pixelated emptiness of the Transformers franchise in recent years, but though there's an unapologetic 'never mind the quality, feel the width' set-piece approach to it all, what veteran director Miller has remembered to do is put his humans at the heart of the piece and merely make the post-apocalyptic,Salvador-Dali-esque machines the extreme decorations, rather than the other way around. True, even the likes of Hardy and Theron remain battered action-figure archetypes, steel accessories welded to their bodies and vague back-stories giving lip-service to their motivations, but at least we're invested in their ever-diminishing chances of survival and not just the whizz-bang convoy in which they travel.Hardy is perfectly good in the title role, though it's more a Tough Mudder assault-course than a performance. Theron, another major talent, manages to imbue the improbably-named Imperator Furiosa with a weathered humanity and in many ways she's a bigger presence than 'Max' himself. Nicholas Hoult plays the Morlock-like Nux with a wide-eyed craziness and the rest of the canvas is populated by equally unlikely monikered supporting players... ranging from singular supermodels to the great unwashed peasantry.

The beautifully desolate landscapes could be considered the main stars of the piece and are captured in imaginative and stunning cinematography that sweeps across the dusty plains and in between the steampunk'd  juggernauts, enhanced by a post-production process and select coloured filters that do not obscure the physical and practical wardrobe and production design that may yet win technical Oscars next year.

Mad Max: Fury Road doesn't fit neatly into the Hollywood template for pacing - it's a surreal chase movie from its opening seconds until its closing minutes, defying you to pause for breath. It is not a film to be so much 'enjoyed' as 'experienced', a testosterone banquet of apocalyptic action that walks tall and drives hard... but eventually circles back on itself in a way that makes you think, in hindsight, a little of the (literal) running-time could have been sliced off to tighten things up. But this has been a revamp a long time in the making and if it proves more than a little self-indulgent - throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the mix- then at least one can admire its strong visual ambition and sheer A-List clout. 

It's all very silly in hindsight... but you know what you're going to get going in and, in that respect, Fury Road's motor mechanics give the full-service...

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is released by Warner Bros. and arrives in cinemas across the UK from 14th May...

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