Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Let me be honest with you: I went into Mad Max: Fury Road fully expecting to join the chorus of rapturous praise. The reputation precedes it like a shockwave. And yet, somewhere in the middle of its relentless, thundering two hours, I found myself not thrilled, but exhausted. Not dazzled, but detached. Two stars.
The film's biggest problem, for me, is one of identity. George Miller and his defenders will tell you this is a return to form, a faithful continuation of the scrappy, fuel-starved desperation of the original trilogy. But watch the original 1979 film or Mad Max 2 back to back with this and tell me they share the same DNA. The earlier films feel tactile, grounded, genuinely dangerous in a way that suggests real stakes in a recognisable, crumbling world. Fury Road, by contrast, feels like it was shot on a different planet entirely. It's closer to Dune than The Road Warrior. The Earth has been designed out of it.
That hyper-stylised aesthetic isn't just a visual choice, it bleeds into everything. The framerate manipulation is particularly distracting. Once you clock the jittery, sped-up effect in the action sequences, you cannot unsee it, and it starts working against the very spectacle it's meant to enhance. It gives the stunt work a slightly unreal, almost video game quality, which is a genuine shame because the practical stunt choreography is, without question, the film's greatest achievement. Those sequences deserve better than to be undercut by post-production trickery.
Then there's the question of Tom Hardy. He's a genuinely talented actor, and I don't doubt his commitment here, but something fundamental doesn't click. Max, as Gibson played him, especially in Mad Max 2, carried a specific kind of haunted weight. Hardy's version feels like a sketch of that, brooding and grunted in a way that reads more as miscasting than deliberate reinvention. The Interceptor, Max's iconic car and essentially a symbol of everything the character represents, is conspicuously absent for most of the runtime. That absence feels telling. It's as if the film quietly acknowledges it's not quite sure what to do with its own protagonist.
Nicholas Hoult's character is another casualty. There's energy to the performance, but by the time the credits roll, the role amounts to very little. And the script's habit of leaning into declamatory, almost theatrical dialogue tips into self-parody at moments, which doesn't help ground the characters in any kind of emotional reality you can invest in.
Here's where I'll give credit where it's due, though. The vehicular choreography and the practical effects work are genuinely exceptional achievements. The scale and audacity of the set pieces are real. But when the stunt co-ordination is the only element that consistently lands, the whole enterprise starts to feel like the Fast and the Furious model: all noise, no soul. Spectacle without stakes is just noise, and after a while, noise is tiring.
I understand why people love this film. I genuinely do. If you're coming to it purely for visual invention and kinetic energy, it delivers those things in abundance. But I came to it as someone who finds something genuinely irreplaceable in the texture and grit of the early films, that scrappy, desperate quality that made the world feel lived-in and dangerous. Fury Road trades all of that for something shinier and louder, and for me, that trade-off wasn't worth it.
Respectful of the craft. Disconnected from the experience. Two stars, and I'll stand by that.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2026-06-07
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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