Title – Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Director – George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City) 

Cast – Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne

Plot – The origin story of famed rebel warrior Furiosa (Browne & Taylor-Joy) who battles for her survival in an unforgiving post-apocalyptic landscape where crazed figures such as Dr. Dementus (Hemsworth) reign supreme.  

“Ladies and Gentlemen! Start your engines”

Review by Eddie on 24/05/2024

Arriving almost a decade after the box office smashing, Oscar winning and critical and audience darling Fury Road roared into cinemas, there’s no doubt that the odds stacked against the success of George Miller’s latest bout of post-apocalyptic chaos were fairly significant but in good news for all, Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is another highly entertaining blockbuster ride, even though in many aspects it lives in its predecessors shadow. 

Clocking in at an epic 148 minutes running time, Furiosa is the longest Mad Max feature yet and when compared directly with Fury Road’s tight and taut thrill ride offering, there’s clear instances where one feels as though this relatively simple yet drawn out prequel tale of how wasteland warrior Furiosa became who she was (here played in equal parts by Alyla Brown and then Anya Taylor-Joy) could have been sharpened in the editing suite. 

Broken up into five separate chapters, Miller gets stuck straight into things as a child Furiosa is kidnapped by members of Chris Hemsworth’s Dr. Dementus’s bloodthirsty clan and then subsequently introduced to the dangerous world at large that includes Immorten Joe and his Warboy tribe and while here there are all the typical car, truck and bike sequences that fans have come to expect and love from the Mad Max world, this time around Miller takes his foot off the pedal more than you’d expect to offer insight into the wider landscape and the characters within it to varying results of interest. 

Judged purely on an eye-candy and set-piece factor, Furiosa is clearly ahead of most of the pack, even if this time around thanks again to Fury Road, much of what we see here doesn’t have the same surprise or wow factor as what has come before and while you can’t deny the craftsmanship and planning that has taken place to make everything happen here, when compared with new and older entries there’s more of a CGI vibe and manufactured feeling than the prior Miller efforts that we can probably say now with a fair amount of assurance peaked with Fury Road and Road Warrior. 

Spoiling us in the past with action affairs that pushed the limits of what we thought was possible for the cinematic medium, even now at the age of 79 years Miller’s latest film is filled with some world-class moments and some fun acting turns, this time courtesy of a prosthetic-clad Hemsworth having a blast being the big bad and a mostly scrawling Taylor-Joy, who against all the odds manages to say even less than Tom Hardy did back in 2015. 

There’s potential here that if we were witness(me)ing Furiosa outside of having partaken in Fury Road we may look at it with a different lens and judged it differently and while in its own right we have an entertaining Summer blockbuster on our hands here, you can’t help shake the feeling there’s not a lot that occurs in Furiosa that is going to stick in the memory, no character moments or action set pieces that will live on long after the dust has settled, making this latest venture in Miller’s demented version of the end of the world a fun but far from essential one. 

Final Say – 

Unlikely to create the lightning in a bottle magic of Fury Road’s outstanding successes or the unexpected sights found with the 1979 original and its ground-breaking sequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is an above average Hollywood event film that fails to ever overcome the hardships of reaching the heights of what has paved the way for its existence. 

3 1/2 freshly planted trees out of 5