I saw it twice and liked it vastly more the second time around, when I’d adjusted my expectations and had my bearings from the get-go. How satisfied you’ll be after all the “wow!”s and “whew!”s will depend on how fine you are with a film that starts in the middle of the story and is basically a long chase. (As a sequel, a box-office megabomb, and a film starring a pig, it has never gotten its due.) And Mad Max: Fury Road is certainly a blast and a half: You don’t just watch it, you rock out to it. The man made Max Max, The Road Warrior, Lorenzo’s Oil, and especially Babe: Pig in the City, which is like Charlotte’s Web retold by Dickens. He has some serious punk cred to restore.Īs you no doubt know from all the buzz, most critics think Miller has his cred back and then some, and they’ve given him a hero’s welcome. After all, his last two films, Happy Feet and Happy Feet 2, centered on animated dancing penguins. 0001 seconds that the 70-year-old Aussie director has been revving his engines for a long, long time, itching to get back to the blacktop and deliver even wilder automotive mayhem. The majority of sequels have no reason for being apart from sequel money, but watching this fourth Mad Max, I could sense after roughly. It’s a signature move by director George Miller, who gets scary-close (he’s fucking with us) and then says, “Eat my dust.” If you’ve relished the Mad Max series, your heart will leap in Mad Max: Fury Road the first time a “War Rig” made of leftover car and truck frames (human skulls affixed to the grille) or a turbo-charged, weaponized jeep swerves into the foreground and then suddenly roars off into the distance at a 45-degree angle while the camera continues on its scorching horizontal track.