Directed By: George Miller and George Ogilvie

Rating: (1 ½ out of 5)

Max, still pretty cool, despite the general lameness surrounding him

Wow, this movie sucks. I mean, I remember not liking it much when it first came out, but watching it again just served to remind me how lame (and incoherent) it really was. Woof! I guess this movie really represents the turning point for George Miller from making movies about and for adults to making movies about and for kids (he’s the creative force behind the Babe movies, you know the pig… actually, now that I think of it, considering how prominent pigs are in MMBT, maybe this is his transition to making movies about and for pigs).

The first warning sign is when the movie starts up and you see that big PG-13 indication. Mad Max and the Road Warrior (RW) were both rated R, justifiably since they were gritty, violent movies. MMBT is Road Warrior lite, Road Warrior with its edge dulled so much that it doesn’t have an edge.

Well, enough ranting, let’s get on with the review…. MMBT starts off promisingly enough actually. Despite the lame, glossy, Tina Turner song playing over the opening credits, the first scene begins with a beautifully shot high-altitude look at a large swath of open desert. As the camera swoops closer, we see a large cart drawn by a team of camels. A plane flies low over the vehicle, so low that it knocks the driver out of his seat as the camels keep going. The plane circles back around, and we see the pilots: Jedediah (Bruce Spence) and his young son Jedediah, Jr. (Adam Cockburn). Jedediah the elder jumps out of the plane and on the vehicle’s seat (!) and spurs the camels to increase their pace, leaving the driver far behind. In the back of the vehicle, a small monkey throws possessions out the back. The man chasing after the cart finally stops. He removes his scarf, and we see Max with long, flowing hair, looking like he’s just come back from a tryout with Poison (or Whitesnake or another one of those 80s hair bands).

Warning 1: A “cute” kid

Warning 2: Monkey

Okay, now this opening may seem peculiar, and it is. It is also a clear warning that the movie that follows is going to suck. Why? Well, five reasons: (1) Are we really supposed to believe that a plane snuck up on Max and knocked him out of his seat? Max has always had a pretty good situational awareness up until now, and it seems unlikely that a slow-moving prop plane could get the drop on him. (2) If a plane hits you while flying, say, 70-100 miles per hour, would you get up anytime soon? Ever? So although Max is now apparently too deaf and blind to see or hear a plane coming, he’s still virtually indestructible. (3) There is a kid in the plane. A kid who flies the plane home after his dad jumps out to steal the vehicle. Warden’s rule number one is: most movies with kids in them suck. (4) The pilot jumps out of the plane, and lands in the vehicle’s seat. I won’t waste my time on this one. (5) There is a cute animal in the back. Warden’s rule number two: most movies with cute animals in them suck. Also, just for the record, Bruce Spence was also in the Road Warrior. In RW, he also plays a pilot, but at the end of the movie we are told that his character goes off with the survivors of the refinery compound, becomes their leaders, and helps found “the great northern tribe.” At the end of RW, he and Max are buddies. Here they don’t seem to recognize each other (although maybe they do, it is left a bit unclear), so we have to assume he is playing a different character. Now, I’m not a movie producer (although if you have the money and want me to try my hand at it, I’m game), but it seems to me that it is generally a bad idea to cast the same actor in a sequel, playing a similar role, if it isn’t supposed to be the same character. But as I say, I’m just a lowly web-reviewer, not a high powered movie producer (no matter what I tell chicks in bars) so what do I know?

The movie does, however, unexpectedly make us wait for it to really start sucking. Max follows his stolen rig across the desert. Soon he arrives at the outskirts of a thriving community, Bartertown. On his way in, he is offered water by a peddler. Max pulls out a Geiger counter and finds the water is radioactive. This is actually our first evidence that there has been an all-out nuclear war in the Mad Max universe. When did it happen? Clearly, MM is pre-nuclear war. RW might be post, but no one mentions it, so it is hard to be sure. Could the nuclear war have occurred after RW but before MMBT? This is actually a big deal… at least as big a deal as C3PO not remembering he was created on Tatooine. I think sequels really need to be consistent with their predecessors, no?

Anyway, once in Bartertown, Max tries to find his rig. He ends up impressing the first official he meets enough to get a meeting with the leader of Bartertown (see the screen cap at the top of the page). As he enters the town, he has to drop off his weapons at a check point, and we get a horrible, clichéd scene where Max pulls out one weapons after another: several guns, knives, a cross bow, etc. I mean, a lot of hardware. More weapons than any reasonable person would carry. I guess he really is mad.

Aunty Entity’s Lair

The leader of Bartertown is Aunty Entity (Tina Turner). She live in a floating, billowing tent perched on a platform above the teaming masses of Bartertown. We know she’s powerful because she has a blind Japanese guy in a Sumo loincloth sitting around playing sax for her. Tina’s actually not a bad choice for the role, although she pretty much shouts out all her lines. She’s dressed in post-apocalyptic chic, which is fine, except that she’s best known for her great gams, and instead her outfit really calls attention to her less than ample mounds. Look, not to be sexist, and not to denigrate the women (I cried too when I saw how badly Ike treated her in What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993)), but if you’re gonna wear a low-cut outfit, with a push-up bustier no less, you’ve really got to generate some decent cleavage.

Max and Aunty strike a deal

Anyway, there is a little mysterious chit-chat, and then suddenly Aunty’s men attack Max. He deftly fend them off, showing that despite the opening scene, he hasn’t really lost a step. After disarming his attackers, Aunty stops him from wreaking further damage. It turns out the attack was an audition. Aunty needs someone to, um, eliminate some problems, and Max looks like the man to do it. Through a periscope, Aunty shows Max his target, a tandem called Master-Blaster who together run the underground pig farm that supplies Bartertown with all its energy needs by producing methane from pig shit (!). Master (Angelo Rossitto) is a dwarf who rides on the back of Blaster (Paul Larsson) a giant. Master is the brains, Blaster the brawn, and together they form a challenge to Aunty’s rule over Bartertown. Aunty needs someone to eliminate Master-Blaster. If Max agrees to do the job, Aunty promises she’ll reequip him and let him get back on the road.

Master-Blaster

In order to get closer to Master-Blaster, Max takes a job shoveling pig waste. Coincidentally, his rig (the one stolen in the opening scene) is also down underground, and while Max is working, Master-Blaster and one of his men are trying to figure out how to disarm Max’s booby traps. Conveniently, Max is in a position to help. He has a little confrontation with Master-Blaster, during which Master-Blaster turns off all energy to Bartertown to demonstrate his power. Ultimately, Max agreed to help, but as he’s disarming the bomb, he sets off an alarm. The loud noise seems to cripple Blaster. Max then pulls out a whistle and blows. The shrill sound has the same effect on Blaster as the alarm. Armed with this knowledge, Max agrees to take on Master-Blaster.

Back up on the surface, Max challenges Master-Blaster and demands the return of his vehicle. Master refuses and orders Blaster to kill Max. As he’s about to do so, Aunty’s men arrest both and order them to settle their dispute in the Thunderdome. Thunderdome, despite the impressive name, is just a big wooden cage. Instead of lingering confrontations or drawn out judicial processes, Bartertown deals with personal disputes by sentencing both parties to Thunderdome, where the operative rule is “Two men enter, one man leaves.”

Thunderdome

Hmmm. Do you think a society can function where the main judicial process is that when two people come into any sort of conflict, the only solution is an immediate fight to the death? Throughout the movie, Aunty is presented as some sort of genius, who was able to carve a society out of the wreckage of nuclear war, but I just don’t get it. Wouldn’t this sort of system simply lead to the domination of the weak by the strong? Wouldn’t the best fighter simply be able to do whatever he wanted? If you weren’t the best fighter why would you come to Bartertown knowing that at any moment you could be challenged to a fight to the death, and that instead of having recourse to the authorities, they would actually enforce this method of “dispute resolution”?

Max wields a mighty hammer

Anyway, Max gets into Thunderdome with Blaster. Both are hooked up to harnesses that suspend them off the ground slightly. There are various weapons scattered about the arena. Before Max can get his whistle out, Blaster is on him and managed to knock the whistle to the ground. Max now has to fight a giant in a straight fight. The fight is something right out of the WWF. Blaster jumps up and down on Max’s back, flings him into the sides of the arena, and generally beats on him. They both basically fly around on these harnesses, with Max jumping over Blaster’s head several times. In the end, Max manages to recover the whistle, and with it in his mouth he smashes Blaster over the head with a giant hammer several times until he knocks his helmet off. On one hand, this is an exciting fight, but on the other, it is really ridiculous. At one point Max gets a chainsaw. He approaches Blaster who backs away. Then suddenly the chainsaw sputters out, and now Max has to turn and run. Puh-leeze. And then there is the matter of these magic harnesses. They never tangle up, and they allow Max and Blaster to defy the law of gravity. I guess if they were elastic and set at exactly the right tension, this might be possible, but I don’t know… seems unlikely.

Bet you didn’t expect Blaster to look like this under the helmet, right?

In any case, as the fight comes to an end, Max has Blaster at his mercy, prone and without his helmet. But as Max approaches to deliver the coup de grace, he sees Blaster’s face and hesitates. Blaster has the face of a child; he’s obviously mentally challenged. He gives Max a big goofy grin when Max lowers the hammer without smiting him. Five seconds earlier Blaster was a quick moving, violent giant of a man, and now suddenly he’s presented as childlike and innocent. Huh? Max refuses to kill him in cold blood despite the desires of the crowd for him to fulfill the promise of “two men enter, one man leaves.” He turns toward Aunty and tells her the deal is off, and which point Aunty’s men shoot Blaster with arrows and finish him off. Now, of course, if Aunty was willing to kill Blaster in cold blood, why did she need Max in the first place?

…and why is this called Gulag?

Now Max is in trouble. Having broken his deal with Aunty, he now has to face the second form of “justice” in Bartertown: “Bust a deal, face the wheel.” The wheel in this case is literally that, a wheel of fortune with penalties engraved on it, including “death,” “Aunty’s choice,” and several others. Max is forced to spin the wheel, and it lands on “Gulag.” I wish I understood what happens next, but I just don’t. When I hear the word “Gulag,” I think of Stalin-era Soviet work camps for political prisoners. In Bartertown, however, “Gulag” apparently means something completely different. For his punishment, Max is tied to a horse facing backwards. The horse has a pole with a flask of water suspended from it in front of him to encourage the horse to walk forward. Aunty’s men place a giant, Mardi Gras head on Max’s head (!), and he and horse are shooed out into the desert. I’m not sure my description quite does justice to the absurdity of this scene.

The horse keeps walking in the desert until it finally collapses from exhaustion and thirst. Max, remains on the horse, facing backwards, the whole time. This is a guy, remember, who picked a handcuff in seconds in RW. Well, anyway, Max stumbles around for a while, but with little water he soon collapses himself. Just when Max looks like he’s fought his last fight, a figure appears out of the blowing desert sands and drags Max back to safety. To our surprise, we find that Max’s rescuer is a teenage girl, living with a tribe of several dozen children and no adults. What was she doing out in the middle of the desert when she lives in a sheltered valley with water? Who knows? It is never really explained.

Max and an army of children

The children think Max is “Captain Walker.” We later learn that the children are survivors of a plane crash that occurred as Armageddon raged. Apparently, although this also isn’t well explained, the survivors took shelter in the cove, but at some point all the adults left to try to find civilization leaving the children behind. Why would they do such a thing? Who knows? Walker was the plane’s captain and the children have lived for years, waiting for him to return to bring them back to civilization. In the meantime, the kids have learned to hunt and fish, have developed a working organization complete with leaders, and have created the basis of a primitive religion revolving around retelling the story of their abandonment. Plus the older kids have started, um, getting intimate and having their own children. I think, this latter development is sort of icky, since none of the kids looks older than 15 or so, and some of the babies are 18 months old or more. Do the math. There is nothing sadder than babies having babies, I always say. Anyway, this whole plot twist is just so fundamentally implausible that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth just to type it. But things get worse.

Waiting for Max to fly them home

Well, Max tells them he’s not Walker, which leaves the kids disappointed until a few of them realize that if Max could walk to them, they could walk to wherever he came from. He tries to dissuade them from putting this plan into action by pointing out that Bartertown is certainly not as nice as their pleasant little cove, but you know how kids are. Once they get a bee in their bonnet, there is no reasoning with them. Despite Max’s best efforts, which include slugging one 15 year old girl unconscious, and tying up a bunch of them, a group ventures out into the desert. Max wakes up the next morning and goes after them. He catches up with the group literally just in time to keep them from being swallowed up by a very aggressive sinkhole. What a coincidence.

Max and the kids camp in the desert. The next morning they wake up. Just over the next rise is Bartertown. Presumably because they are out of water, Max decides that Bartertown is their only hope. So they approach the town secretly, and drop down into one of the air vents leadign to the underground pig farm. Max doesn’t really have firm control over his flock. By the time he gets into the vent, several of the kids have gone on ahead. And by the time he catches up with them, several have climbed out of the vent and into the pig chamber and are clambering on the pipes up over the heads of Aunty’s men who now run the pig farm. Frankly, I’m not even sure what Max was hoping to accomplish at this point. I guess he wants to ask Master for help, or something. Master, btw, is now at Aunty’s mercy. She’s keeping him around for his brains, but her men force him to live in a small pen down among the pigs. Also, even though he originally seemed to be a power-mad bad guy, it turns out he’s really just a cuddly old (and short) man.

Bartertown’s generator… and Max’s escape vehicle. Convenient, eh?

Well, needless to say, the bad guys spot the kids, and we get a weird, Keystone Cops style fight scene, where the kids swinging from ropes disable several of the men, and Max does a little fighting of his own. It’s really weak. Lots of motion on screen, but no real tension or excitement. They even rip off Star Wars (1977) — which probably was ripping off a silent movie itself — when Max chases one of the bad guys around a corner, only to turn around and run back toward the camera pursued by a gaggle of bad guys (remember, the same thing happens to Han Solo on the Deathstar). Max, the kids, Master, and Pigkiller (a convict serving a sentence underground, played by Robert Grubb) hop on-board what looks like a truck with train wheels. Apparently, this contraption is being used as some sort of refinery for the methane because it is hooked up to various pipes leading up into Bartertown, but it is also a working vehicle conveniently placed on functional train tracks. With Pigkiller in the driver’s seat, they put this truck-thingy into gear, and it gradually pulls away down the tracks. Up above, Bartertown erupts in flames and explosions as this happens.

Have I managed to convey the fundamental incoherence of this entire sequence? I hope so because it really just makes no sense whatsoever. We next cut to a view of the truck/train contraption tearing down a set of perfectly maintained train tracks. Who built these tracks? How long have they been there? Are they used often? For what? Why was the entire power plant for Bartertown on wheels anyway? Why does Bartertown explode as a result of disconnecting the truck/train thing?

Looks a little like Road Warrior, right?

We get a lame chase, as Aunty and her men pursue the truck/train. At one level it is just a rip-off of the final chase in RW. But the tone is different. All the violence is muted. Instead of an edgy action movie, what we get is closer in tone to the Three Stooges (which I presume reflects Mel Gibson’s infatuation with Moe, Larry, and Curly). None of the kids gets hurt. Heck, none of the bad guys get hurt. Even Ironbar (Angry Anderson), Aunty’s chief henchman and Max’s main antagonist escapes largely unscathed, despite being thrown off a bridge, being caught between the truck/train and a exploding vehicle (he just gets covered in soot, like in a cartoon), and finally being involved in a head-on crash at the end.

Ironbar survives this fireball with just a little soot to show for it.

I’m not sure what happened here. The first half of the movie, before Max is exiled to the desert is actually closer in tone to the first two movies. There is a real sense of menace in the air, and Aunty has the retarded Blaster killed in cold blood. But the second half of the movie, once the kids are introduced, has a much lighter feel to it, as if Miller and Ogilvie wanted to end on an upbeat note to ensure their PG-13 rating and please a younger audience.

Well, anyway, to wrap things up. Just as it seems as if Max and the gang are going to get away, there is suddenly a barrier on the railway. As the truck/train slows before it, the kid from the opening scene reappears, armed with a couple of rifles to rob the truck/train, as if this were a well-traveled railroad. Of course, seeing Aunty and her men off in the distance, still giving chase, Jedediah, Jr. runs away. Max and the gang follow him through an underground warren that he and his father call home. Coming out the other side, they run toward the plane. You can guess the rest. It is a race to take off before Aunty and her men arrive. At the climactic moment, Max jumps in a truck, and drives ahead of the plane to clear out a path for it to take off, and of course, the plane managed to get off the ground just as Max’s truck crashes head on with Ironbar while Max jumps to safety. The plane flies away, and instead of killing Max, Aunty just sighes, “Well, ain’t we a pair, Raggedy Man? So long, soldier.”

A narrow, clichéd, escape

The movie ends with the plane flying over an abandoned, burned out city. The kids settle there, and we see them years later, inhabiting various bombed out buildings, lighting fires to guide Max home. Ugh, kill me.

I’m shocked that there are actually people out there who like this movie. What dreck. A complete betrayal of the tone and style of the first two movies. Miller apparently fell in love with the mythical aspect of the story and wanted to find an upbeat way to end the story arc. But the thing is that the story arc was over after RW. MM and RW are about a man burning out and then finding a reason to care again. The stuff about Max now serving as an archetype, a hero redeeming mankind, is simply outside the scope of the original story line. A trilogy that began with an edgy, cult movie, ends with an empty exercise in Hollywood-style formalism.

Directed by: George Miller

Rating: (4 out of 5)

Mel returns as the Road Warrior

I think most people prefer The Road Warrior (RW), a.k.a. Mad Max 2, to its predecessor, Mad Max (1979). Personally, I’m torn. I am usually most fond of whichever I’ve seen more recently. While Mad Max (MM) is definitely grittier and more viscerally powerful, the Road Warrior is more polished and professional. Mad Max is a great cult and independent movie, a triumph of style and skill over material limitations. Road Warrior is, simply, a GREAT action movie; in my estimation it ranks up there with The Terminator (1984) and Die Hard (1988) as one of the three best action movies of all time. (BTW, you can use this information to deduce my rough age. If I were older, I would probably single out Bullitt (1968) or the Wild Bunch (1969); younger and I’d be telling you the best included Independence Day (1996), the Rock (1996) or Con Air (1997) (which is another potential movie for review being set partially in an airborne prison).

RW starts off with a voice-over narration introducing us to Max’s (Mel Gibson) world. It basically summarizes the events of the first movie, and sort of clarifies the political situation in the world. I say “sort of” because actually the narration is little confusing about the time frame of things. It tells us that a world war has occurred, but it isn’t clear whether that happens before or after the events in the first movie. In any case, the setting of RW is much more desolate than in MM. Instead of being in a crumbling urban environment with permanent settlements, RW is set in “the wasteland,” a desert with nothing but roads, nomadic gangs, and sand and rock.

Max’s V-8, after some time on the road

The movie opens with a short, but intense action sequence as Max is attacked on the highway by a small group of outlaws. Max is still driving his V-8 interceptor from the first movie, although it does look a little the worse for the wear. He’s also added a dog to replace the one killed in the first movie. The dog’s name is, perhaps unsurprisingly given Max’s laconic nature, named “Dog.” In any case, Max’s first instinct is to run, but as his fuel supply runs low, he realizes he’s going to have to fight. He slows down enough for the bad guys to pass him on both sides, but just as they’re about to shoot at him with arrows, he slams on the brakes and they shoot each other. Now behind one of the cars, Max restarts his supercharger and rear-ends one of the bad guys, who loses control and crashes into his fellow gang members. Max slams on the brakes, tires screeching, and car shimmying from the rapid deceleration. He jumps out of the car, his old leather police uniform battered, and now customized with tools and weapons. He is no longer Max, family man and cop, but rather the Road Warrior. I like the opening. It is a classic, and it really sets the mood for the rest of the movie. Max is not a superhero; he’s just a little quicker and cooler than the rest.

After salvaging what fuel he can, Max continues on his wanderings. By the side of the road, he comes upon a strange machine–an ultralight helicopter contraption sitting apparently by itself. He outmaneuvers the snake that is guarding the gyro, but as he does, the pilot rises up out of the sand and threatens him with a crossbow. Two points here: (1) How long has the gyro pilot (Bruce Spence) been buried in the sand waiting for someone to come by? I mean, this is pretty desolate country, it could be weeks between visitors. (2) One interesting thing about RW is how scarce guns are. Think about it, this is a world that has recently undergone a world war, and yet Max is always desperately scrounging up shotgun shells, and the head villain who we meet later, literally has a half-dozen bullets to his name. Everyone else is armed with simpler projectile weapons: long bows, crossbows, and even flamethrowers, but few guns.

The besieged refinery

With the help of Dog, Max manages to disarm the gyro pilot. In order to save his life, the pilot offers to show Max where he can get a lot of fuel. He then leads him to an extraordinary sight, a walled community built around a refinery in the desert. The community is a last ditch attempt to maintain a semblance of civilization in a world gone mad. The inhabitants are under siege from crazed nomads, the descendants of the gangs Max fought on the highways in MM. The nomad dress like punk rockers, and drive a varied collection of motorcycles, trucks, and dune buggies, virtually all of them armed and armored. And they want the fuel.

So, um, what are doing out here again?

Now, here is the thing… we’ve got this strange quasi-apocalyptic setting, defined largely by the absence of law, the scarcity of gasoline, and the physical bareness of the land. So why would a nomadic, fuel-dependent gang arise in that setting? The gang’s structure is well-defined and hierarchical. They are organized enough to maintain a siege. But what are they doing out in the wasteland, tearing around in motorized vehicles, when the only easy source of fuel comes from attacking others who make the mistake of traveling in their direction? It’s not like they’re sitting astride trade routes, or pasture land, or farm land. How do they eat? And I guess this is where RW falls short; unlike MM which occurs in a recognizable world (especially to someone in the late 1970s who had recently lived through the massive upsurge in crime in the late 1960s/early 1970s and the gas shortages of 1973 and 1979), RW requires a fundamental suspension of disbelief. A lot of things happen in RW because the plot requires it, rather than because events follow some sort of consistent internal logic.

Looking out onto an army of crazies

Max sets up an observation post. The next morning, Max is awakened by the sound of engines. As he watches, several vehicles drive out of the community and into the desert, with the gang members chasing them. The desert crazies quickly swarm on the escaping vehicles. Max watches as one is caught, and its occupants attacked. After the gang members depart, leaving the the car’s passengers for dead, Max swoops down and finds that one is still alive. Cutting a hasty deal to trade the man’s life for gas, Max loads him into his car and approaches the compound. His appearance is hardly one to generate trust, but when they see that Max has brought back one of their own, he’s cautiously admitted into inside the walls. Max simply wants to refuel his car and go, but before he can complete the deal, the man he rescued dies. With his death, Max’s “contract” evaporates. At the same time, the crazies return, having tracked down all the escaping vehicles, and displaying their new captives tied to their cars and trucks.

Doesn’t that mask get awfully hot in the desert? And I won’t even ask about the leather harness.

At this point, we meet the leader of the nomads. He is a massively muscled man wearing a metal mask, sort of Conan (the Barbarian, not the talk show host) meets Darth Vader, appropriately named The Humungus (Kjell Nilsson). With a mixture of threats and promises, he makes the compounds inhabitants an offer: If they’ll walk away from the gas, he’ll provide them safe passage through the wasteland. But if they try to escape or take the fuel with them, they will all be killed. This causes division within the group, especially since their captured comrades had been on a mission to find a truck large enough to haul the gasoline away with them. Their failure and the on-going siege has sapped their morale. Enter Max to the rescue. He informs the group that he spotted a large rig a couple of days back, and that he’ll bring it back if they’ll agree to release him, his car, and as much gas as he can carry in return. Max departs on foot that same night.

Max’s trip across the wasteland is relatively uneventful. He hitches a ride from the gyro pilot he’d conveniently left chained to a tree trunk earlier. As he approaches the compound in the truck, he’s attacked by the nomads. This is another great action sequence, as Max fights off a swarm of assailants, and drives through their camp to the fortress refinery. As he drives through the main gates, several of the besieging nomads follow into the compound, leading to a wild fight as the defender try to hold their perimeter while also dealing with the attackers now inside. With some help from Max, they manage to hold off the onslaught again.

A bloody Max watches last moments of the last of the V-8 interceptors.

As The Humungus and his men rage outside, torturing the prisoners they captured during the earlier ill-fated reconnaissance runs, the inhabitants of the compound work around the clock to prepare for their departure using the truck Max has delivered to carry their fuel. Max, however, doesn’t plan to stay around with them. Instead, he loads up his car with gas, and heads out in the middle of the night. Of course, he is pursued, in a relatively short sequence, he is tracked down and run off the road. He manages to pull himself out of his mangled car, and is saved from death by a booby trap on his gas tanks that kills his attackers before they can finish him off. Seeing the cloud of black smoke over the horizon, the gyro pilot takes off and brings Max, battered and bloody, back to the compound.

His car destroyed, and his future bleak, Max offers to drive the big rig in the escape attempt. What follows is one of the greatest, extended action sequences in the movies. It really has to be seen to be appreciated, and there is no way I can adequately describe it even with pictures to help. Max is driving the truck, which is hauling a full tanker. The tanker is armored, covered with turrets and barbed wire–a rolling fortress. Tearing down the road at highway speeds, Max and a couple of others fights off dozens of attackers armed with arrows, grappling hooks, and their own vehicles. It is just a wild sequence, beautifully executed throughout. Max manages to kill off most of the attackers, and at the climactic moment rams The Humungus as he drives off the road.

A grappling hook-armed attacker…. and Max meets the Humungus head on.

As we know, Max lives to fight another day in the sequel, Max Mad: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), but I think most Mad Max fans agree that this sequence is the highpoint of the series. The first movie is definitely darker and quirkier and more human, but the Road Warrior is technically brilliant, exciting, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Are these the auditions for Cruising?

Directed By: George Miller

Rating: (3 ½ out of 5)

Max before he’s mad

Although Mad Max is often called a post-apocalyptic movie, it really isn’t. It is more precisely a dystopian vision of the future, where civil society is under siege by increasing crime and disorder. The vision of future in Mad Max is in many ways similar to that presented in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Similarly, Mad Max’s view of the police as constrained by outdated rules and regulations echoes Dirty Harry (1971) and its sequels. Indeed, unlike A Clockwork Orange which ultimately uses this vision of the future to raise profound questions about the role of government in controlling free will and the tradeoffs involved in such a course, Mad Max, like Dirty Harry makes the more mainstream case for judicial retribution. Or does it? For a low budget movie, Mad Max is surprising challenging in terms of its core philosophy because although our hero does “triumph” in the end, he is also so emotionally wounded as to be dead inside. This is not your typical happy ending.

But people don’t watch or remember Mad Max for its social commentary. Mad Max is remembered, rightly, as a great action movie. Director George Miller imbues all the action sequences with a wild, frenetic energy. It is really a case of technique overcoming material limitations. Think of the scene where the biker gang chases down and terrorizes the young couple. There is almost no on-screen violence, but Miller creates a terrifying experience through sound and quick cuts of a car being destroyed.

Max challenges Nightrider to a game of chicken

The movie begins with a great action sequence. A maniac who calls himself the Nightrider (Vincent Gil) has killed a cop and stolen a souped-up police interceptor, and the movie opens with the police desperately trying to stop him before he drives into inhabited areas. The police are hardly model citizens themselves. The first cop we see is spying on a naked couple through a rifle scope. And the standard operating procedure for ending car chases in this world is some combination of shotgun blasts and ramming. (Maybe they should have tried that with OJ when he went on the lam.) Unfortunately, the first cops on the scene end up crashing their cars spectacularly rather than stopping the Nightrider, so they call on Max (Mel Gibson).

Max is the epitome of a cool customer. His first encounter with the Nightrider is a harrowing game of chicken, with Max forcing the maniac to swerve first. His nerve broken by the encounter, the Nightrider falls apart as Max wheels his car around and begins to tail him at breakneck speeds. Miller makes a great use of sound in all the action sequences. The cars are early-1970s Detroit muscle cars, with small frames and big loud engines. They don’t hum along so much as they growl, and not the smooth roar of fancy European sport cars, but rather the sound of barely contained beasts. At crucial moments, Miller seems to manipulate the film stock, either washing out the colors or maybe speeding up the film (it’s hard to tell) to create a sense of sudden discontinuity. Watch carefully the several shot sequence at the end of the Nightrider chase, where we cut from the sudden appearance of a workman waving a red flag as the cars crest a hill, to the Nightrider’s passenger looked back anxiously, to the sight of Max’s car braking, to a shot of the obstacle ahead, to the Nightrider trying to swerve and putting his car into a spin, and finally to an extreme close up of the Nightrider’s eyes as he realizes he’s going to crash. This sequence is so much more interesting than the usual way action movies end car chases: with a slow-mo view of a car hitting a ramp, taking off, and then twisting through the air until it explodes on impact. The movie has a distinct visual style that goes a long way to explaining its cult status.

The next scene features Max at home watching his wife (Jessie, played by Joanne Samuel) play the sax, while in the background a news story about the death of the Nightrider is on TV. Frankly, these home scenes (we get more later) never really work. The idea, of course, is to show Max is a normal man, and to demonstrate his attachment to his wife. But it feels like filler. I don’t think we ever really get a sense of the connection between the two. Their conversations don’t seem like those a married couple would have; they are more like conversations two unrelated people might make up if they were trying to convince the INS they were really married. In part, the problem is that the movie is deliberately trying to play up the disconnect between Max’s normal home life and his mad existence on the roads. But it is too forced. Everyday Max goes on the roads and kills people (bad guys to be sure, but still). And then suddenly he’s at home, Mr. Family Man, telling sappy stories about taking walks with his dad? The world is falling apart on the outside, and the home scenes come of as delusional rather than normal.

The gang and Toecutter

Luckily, the movie soon shifts back into an action realm. The Nightrider’s gang rides into a small town to pick up his remains. The gang is led by the Toecutter, who is played by Hugh Keays-Byrne as sort of a cross between Charles Manson and Joan Crawford. He wears eyeshadow for crying out loud. Toecutter’s gang is reminiscent of the gang of outlaws that rides into town in westerns. They would also fit in fine in any number of biker movies. Despite their somber task, the gang has time to terrorize the town… well, that and prance around a lot. Not to be politically incorrect or anything, but in both Mad Max and its sequel, the Road Warrior, a lot of the outlaw bikers seem a little, um, light in the loafers, if you know what I mean. Combined with the leather clad cops, you don’t have to be Quentin Tarentino to spot a homoerotic subtext here. In a later scene, the cops have one of the bad guys all trussed up in chains, and the police chief’s (Fifi, played by Roger Ward) outfit at another point would allow him to be a lead character in a BDSM porno. Anyway, I’m not quite sure what to make of all that, but there is definitely something going on here.

The pursuit….

Among the people watching the gang’s antics is a young couple. At first, they’re just having fun watching, but when the gang’s activities turn more violent, including dragging one poor sap down the main street from the back of a motorcycle, they decide to skedaddle. This is a good idea, but executed badly in this case. As they pull out, they nearly run over Toecutter, who sets out after them down the road. The bikers catch the car quickly, and run it off the road. They quickly attack the car, smashing windows, puncturing the roof, and tearing apart the engine. The whole scene is just a series of quick cuts, but blended together gives the impression of a violent assault. The scene with the young couple being pulled out of the window of the car and surrounded by gang members.

…and the aftermath

Max and his friend Goose (Steve Bisley) are dispatched to the scene, where we see the aftermath of destruction. The male of the couple is spotted running away from the scene, and the woman is wrapped in rags with a rope around her neck. Both have obviously been brutally raped. Also at the scene is one of the bikers (Johnny the Boy, played by Tim Burns), too stoned out of his gourd to ride away. Though arrested, Johnny the Boy is soon released because no one shows up in court to press charges. Goose goes nuts and tries to kill Johnny right there, but Max and the others restrain him. This scene provides a not-too-subtle dig at the legal process, but also makes clear that no matter how much disorder seems to rule, a functioning legal system exists. The nature of this legal system is more than a little unclear. Apparently, there are courts and lawyers, but at the same time, the inside of the police HQ looks like an abandoned warehouse. The scene ends with Goose and Johnny exchanging threats, and the police captain letting his men know that at least on the roads, if not in court, anything goes.

Cooked goose

Unfortunately for Goose, the gang gets to him first. While he is at a nightclub, they tamper with his bike. The next day on the road, Goose’s wheels suddenly lock up and he is pitched through the air, landing hard. Amazingly, he gets up and walks away, but after borrowing a truck to transport his bike, Goose is attacked by the gang. They throw a wheel through his windshield, and when the truck tumbles off the road it traps Goose inside as fuel leaks from the gas tank. On my DVD version of the movie, this chapter title is “The Goose is Cooked,” so you can imagine what happens next. Goose isn’t killed though, but he might as well be. The sight of his charred friend in the hospital is too much for Max, who storms away and makes up his mind to quit the force. The captain tried to convince him otherwise, and suggests he take a few weeks off. Max is still determined to quit, but he agrees.

We next see Max, Jessie, and their son Sprog (?), loaded into a van and driving out into the countryside. Everything is going well, until Max stops at a junkyard/auto shop to get a tired fixed. While the mechanic is fixing the spare, Jessie goes off with Sprog to find some ice cream. By coincidence, Toecutter’s gang is camping by the store, and they begin to harass Jessie. She manages to fight them off, and drives back to pick up Max. They seem to get away in the clear, but the gang is looking for them now.

Jessie tries to outrun the gang

They hide out with some elderly relatives on a farm near the water. There is a chilling scene as Jessie heads down to the beach with only the family dog because Max is working on the van. At first, everything seems fine, but when the dog disappears, Jessie gets creeped out and heads back to the house through the woods. The woods are always a scary place (as was demonstrated so effectively by the Blair Witch Project (1999)), but Jessie quickly realizes someone else is there with her. We see vague movement at first, and after a while, we spot individual gang members chasing after her. She runs into the dog, hanging from a tree, gutted. Still, she manages to elude her pursuers and makes it back to the house. Max, armed with a shotgun, goes off to examine the woods himself. While Max is off, Jessie suddenly realizes Sprog is missing. She searches for him frantically, but when she finds him, he’s been captured by the gang. Jessie begs them to let him go, but she is only saved by the arrival of the elderly aunt armed with a shotgun. They lock the gang member up in an old barn, and try to escape in the van. Unfortunately, after just a couple of minutes, the engine gives out. Jessie grabs Sprog and tries to make a run for it, but the bikers have broken out and ride her down. Max arrives too late to save them. His son is dead, and his wife is maimed and fatally wounded. This all drives Max over the edge.

He goes back to his house, and breaks out his leather policy uniform. He breaks into the police HQ and steals a new supercharged V-8, and heads out onto the road. The last 15 minutes of the movie feature Max tracking down and taking revenge on the gang members. He runs several off the road, but then he gets ambushed and shot in the leg (which is why he wears a brace and walks with a limp in the Road Warrior (1981)). He manages to survive the ambush and shoot one of his attackers, while the others run off. This is actually one of the few big holes in the movie. If the gang has guns, why didn’t they just shoot him again from a distance rather than trying to run him over and giving him a chance to use his sawed off shotgun? In any case, the ambush leads into a spectacular chase scene, where Max tries to ride down Toecutter. Miller keep his camera low to the road to increase the sense of speed. Finally Max manages to force Toecutter into a head on collision with an 18 wheeler.

Mad Max finishes off the Toecutter with a little help from an 18 wheeler

The only one left is Johnny the Boy. Max drives all over the highways trying to track him down, but finally comes upon him by luck. Following the tracks of a truck that has run off the road, Max finds Johnny scavenging the site. Max gets the drop on him, and cuffs his ankle to the overturned truck. Then Max rigs a makeshift bomb from a broken headlight, leaking fuel, and lighter. In one of the most memorable scenes in the movie, Max hands Johnny a hacksaw, “The chain in those handcuffs is high tensile steel. It’d take you ten minutes to hack through them with this. Now, if you’re lucky, you could hack through your ankle in five minutes.” He limps away, and hits the road. In the background, we see an explosion that presumably consumes Johnny. A killer ending… literally.

Mad Max is truly a product of the 1970s — a time capsule almost of fears about rising crime, collapsing legal systems, and oil shortages. It is also an extremely well made low-budget movie. If it pales compared to The Road Warrior, it does so only by virtue of the latter’s larger budget and more intricately choreographed stunts. Mad Max has a visceral energy, especially in its action sequences, that have only been matched in a handful of movies.