Mad Max 2 (1981)
★★★★½ — Mad Max 2 (1981)
By 1981, the post-apocalyptic road movie had found its spiritual home in the Australian Outback. Mad Max had arrived two years earlier as a low-budget surprise, a rough-edged and mean-spirited piece of work that put both its director and its lead actor on the map. For the sequel, the scope was widened considerably, the world-building pushed further out into the dust, and the result was something that felt less like a follow-up and more like a complete reimagining. Where the first film was grounded in a recognisable, if fraying, social order, Mad Max 2 strips all of that away and plants itself firmly in a society already collapsed, one where petrol is the new currency and survival is the only philosophy worth holding. The film set a template that action and science fiction cinema has been borrowing from ever since.
George Miller returned to direct, and the step up in ambition is noticeable from the first frame. Working again through Kennedy Miller Productions, Miller constructed a lean, almost mythological narrative around his taciturn hero, Max Rockatansky, a loner drifting through a sun-scorched wasteland and drawn into the defence of a small community besieged by a marauding gang led by the masked and muscle-bound Lord Humungus. The film runs to a tidy 96 minutes and rarely wastes a single one of them. Miller's handling of action sequences, particularly the vehicle-based set pieces filmed in the New South Wales outback, gave the production a visceral physicality that was genuinely unusual for its era. If you want to see where a generation of filmmakers learned how to shoot chaos at speed, this is one of the places to look. Miller would revisit this world again in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, though that third entry would carry a noticeably different feel.
Mel Gibson returns as Max, a role that suited his quietly coiled screen presence rather well at this point in his career. He was still building the kind of international profile he would later cement in films like Lethal Weapon, and here he plays Max as a man of very few words and even fewer illusions, which is exactly what the film needs. Around him, the supporting cast leans into the film's heightened, almost pantomime register. Bruce Spence is memorable as the Gyro Captain, a wiry and opportunistic figure who provides much of the film's odd comic relief, while Vernon Wells as the mohawked Wez and Max Phipps as the Toadie contribute to an ensemble of antagonists that is polished but unremarkable on paper, yet somehow vivid on screen. The production design and costuming do a lot of the heavy lifting in making these characters feel like they belong to a world with its own strange internal logic.
One of the best intros of all time. Mad Max 2 is so superior to the first one it's literally like night and day. The post apocalyptic feel is captured perfectly. It's like a DnD one-shot but in the desolate outback, with cars. The stunts are unbelievable. The finale is nail biting. Honestly... I tried to think why isn't this a 5* for me and I couldn't think of a reason to mark it down to 4.5* so up to the 5s it goes.
I find it hard to argue with that top rating, and I wasn't looking very hard for reasons to. There is a confidence to Mad Max 2 that you don't always find even in films that cost ten times as much to make, a sense that everyone involved knew exactly what kind of film they were making and committed to it without reservation. The practical stunt work in particular holds up in a way that a lot of its contemporaries simply don't, and that finale genuinely earns its reputation. Sometimes a film just does what it sets out to do, does it brilliantly, and that's enough.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 1981 | Watched: 2025-05-03
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from George Miller: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) · Mad Max (1979)
More with Mel Gibson: Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) · Lethal Weapon (1987) · Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) · Mad Max (1979)
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More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
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More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
