Furiosa: A Non-Mad Max Saga

furiosa a Mad Max Saga is a solid entertaining action movie with some great set pieces wonderful visual design a refreshingly simple and minimalistic script that accomplishes a lot with very little sharply drawn characters played by very capable actors and a story that helps to flesh out the world laid down in Fury Road a decade earlier the only problem here is the whole Mad Max thing which is pretty misleading when it's got absolutely nothing to do with him and perhaps explains why the movie opened to a dismal 31 1 million Memorial Day weekend and is already on track to become yet another disappointing flop in a year that's getting pretty crowded with them but more on that later the point I'm making is that this is all a bit of a shame because taking furiosa on its own merits I actually really enjoyed this movie the action scenes were visceral and impactful enough to keep me entertained even if it's pretty obvious they relied a lot more on CGI this time around Ana Taylor Joy and Chris Hemsworth both turning Great Performances and the simple straightforward story of Revenge and Redemption was a nice change from the pointlessly convoluted crap that so many screenwriters churn out just to try to look smarts anyway on with the plot analysis so the movie begins with a very extended Preamble showing furiosa as a kid living in the idilic green place before getting snatched away by a gang of marauders eventually ending up in the hands of the warlord dementus who wants to take the green place for himself so that he can strip it for resources naturally furri isn't too keen on helping him especially after he crucifies her mother to death for trying to rescue her oh you naughty boy dementus anyway eventually he and his biker Army wind up at the Citadel ruled over by a Morton Joe and after taking control of the oil refinery nearby he's able to broker a deal where he supplies Joel with oil and Joe supplies him with food and water and as part of the deal furiosa gets handed over to Joe to become one of his many wives man sometimes you just can't catch a break anyway furiosa is not too keen on that idea and after escaping she disguises herself as a boy and becomes a mechanic instead slowly working her way up the ranks until eventually she finds herself stationed on the war rig piloted by the charismatic petorian Jack but with tensions Rising between imort and Joe and dementus and War about to break out what is furiosa to do will she risk it all to take revenge against the man who stole everything from her or ride off into the sunset in search of her childhood home I mean let's be real here if you've seen Fury Ro then you probably know the answer already and I think that's part of the problem with a prequel like this Fury Road had already closed out furiosa's story and gave us the resolution we were looking for so this is more like filling in the gaps of a history that we didn't particularly care about want to know how she lost her arm and replaced it with a metal one want to know more about her relationship with imort and Joel want to know how she came to be in command of the war rig nah me neither because the answers to those questions are never going to be as interesting as the Mystique around the character they're all just details in a story that's already been told and told pretty well I mean as a standalone movie it's perfectly serviceable even pretty gripping at times this younger less experienced furiosa is a cool enough character tough and Scrappy and resilient but with just enough compassion and Humanity left in her driven by her desperate desire to find a way back home and damn man it makes this scene from Fury Road all the more poignant in retrospect Anya Taylor Joy has some pretty big shoes to fill but to be fair she does a commendable job with the role she's a great actress in most roles but I wasn't really sure how capable she'd be as an action star for the most part though I think she does a solid job she's wiy and agile rather than pretending to be some big powerful brawler which makes her combat scenes a little bit more believable at least that being said I'm pretty sure that being strung up by a severely fractured arm would reduce even the toughest person to tears so I'm not really sure I bought that segment we get it you're really strong and determined but you can still feel pain Chris Hemsworth is probably the star of the show though his performance says dementus is just the right combination of cunning Charisma and pure sadistic Insanity he's a man in his element whenever he's got a war to fight or an enemy toout smart and it's interesting that he gradually comes unstuck during a prolonged piece where he's got nothing to do except rule over his little kingdom the Mad Max Series has always been known for its intense and very physical action scenes Fury Road really set the bar for what was possible with practical effects and while Fury also definitely has a good stab at it it never quite Rises to the same level in fact it's pretty obvious where they use CGI to render stuff that would have been impossible to do for real undermining some of the appeal of this franchise there's a long Chase and battle sequence over the war rig around the midpoint of the movie which is [ __ ] awesome to watch but the problem is that it never really gets better than that there isn't any big blowout action scene to cap the whole movie off and if anything the finale is actually pretty downbeat and anticlimactic and probably drags on a bit too long on that subject actually at 2 and 1/2 hours furiosa definitely suffers from runtime blow mostly because the movie doesn't really get going until like the 40 minute Mark don't get me wrong there's some great moments in that intro sequence that really helped Define furiosa's motivation as a character but honestly it could have been wrapped up in like 15 minutes as it stands it's almost half an hour longer than Fury Road which arguably had more plot and character elements to deal with and the unfortunate result is a film that feels bloated and sluggish towards the ends and when I think about this movie and the story it sets out to tell the question that keeps coming up for me is why why tell this particular story almost a decade after the hype for the last film had died down when it wasn't even that profitable at the time was the world really crying out for a furiosa prequel and why call it Mad Max when it's got nothing to do with Max is it because you know that's what people really wanted to see here one last ride for old man Max to bring his story to a close yes something tells me we're never going to see that like I say furiosa is not a bad movie by any stretch and in a lot of ways it's a solid action flick that should appeal to General audiences but then again so was the Fall Guy and Ministry of ungentlemanly warfare and those films both bombed at the box office maybe it's ticket prices maybe it's because most movies end up on streaming within a matter of weeks anyway or maybe it's just general apathy towards Hollywood these days either way we're witnessing a depressing trend of solid Dependable films that should be crowd Pleasers running straight into a brick wall of public apathy and it seems like furiosa might just be destined to join them anyway that's all I've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 1,509,082

Keywords: critical drinker, review, funny, best, feminism, feminist

Id: gjUz0XF8498

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Mon May 27 2024