Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review: 'More exhausting than exhilarating'

"The dizzying circus stunts and pedal-to-the-metal drag-racing are still spectacular" – but Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is "more exhausting than exhilarating".

Nine years after he reinvented the action movie with Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller has added another film to the savagely dystopian series he began back in 1981. All of the familiar trademarks are there: the endless sand dunes, the souped-up cars and monster trucks, the marauding mutants with piratical costumes and curious names (the vicar must have raised an eyebrow when Scrotus and Erectus were christened). But the new film differs from the last one in several ways. Firstly, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the only Mad Max film so far that doesn't have antihero protaganist Max Rockatansky in the driving seat, either the original Mel Gibson incarnation or the Tom Hardy update. And secondly, it's not quite the masterpiece that Mad Max: Fury Road was – although, to be fair, not many films are.

Furiosa tells the life story of the one-armed, crewcut rebel who was played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron. She is first seen as a young girl (Alyla Browne) living in an Edenic oasis, one of the few places in Australia's post-apocalyptic wasteland where trees still grow and bear fruit. But everything changes when she is abducted by the brutal yet goofy leader of a nomadic biker gang, Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth with a big beard, a fake nose and false teeth. Hemsworth might be enjoying himself slightly too much as this cartoonish baddy – half swaggering Roman general, half laidback Aussie bloke – but if you've ever wanted to know what the mighty Thor would be like if he was played by Mike Myers, you're in luck.

Young Furiosa isn't in luck, though. Dementus passes her on to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), a masked warlord who lives in a tower of rock called the Citadel and is served by the white-painted "war boys" seen in Fury Road. She grows up there until she is old enough to be played by Anya Taylor-Joy, whose massive blue eyes justify her casting: even when she is in a sandstorm and smeared in oil, that glare of hers shines like a car's headlamps.

The adult Furiosa then gets the job of transporting food and fuel between the wasteland's three population centres, The Citadel, Gas Town and The Bullet Farm, and she is taught to be a road warrior by her taciturn, Max Rockatansky-like mentor, Jack, played by Tom Burke. But she still hopes to take her revenge on Dementus, and make it back to her verdant homeland.

You can probably tell how much of a departure all of this is from Fury Road. If that film was essentially one long car chase, with a few brief pit stops, this one is an episodic Bildungsroman, complete with chapter headings, that stretches across several locations and time periods. It's an hour before Taylor-Joy and Burke first appear; there's half an hour in the middle when there's no sign of Hemsworth; there are various political negotiations between rival warlords; and an entire war is consigned to a montage.

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What this means is that Furiosa sacrifices the runaway-train momentum of Fury Road in favour of slow, digressive world-building. As blockbuster prequels go, it's nowhere near as indigestible as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, but it still might leave you asking why Miller filled in all of these background details, and why anyone who isn't a Mad Max obsessive should care about characters who remain collections of gimmicks and gizmos rather than three-dimensional people? Did viewers really stumble out of the cinema after Fury Road with a burning desire to learn about Furiosa and Immortan Joe's early years?

The dizzying circus stunts and pedal-to-the-metal drag-racing are still spectacular enough to recall Steven Soderbergh's two questions about Fury Road: how did Miller get those action sequences finished, and how come hundreds of people weren't killed? But the fact is that they don't top what's been done in previous Mad Max films, and, because they lack a clear, urgent narrative purpose, Miller's strenuous efforts to up the ante come to feel more exhausting than exhilarating. You soon reach the point where you're sick of sand, sick of explosions, sick of off-puttingly sadistic violence, and sick of thunderous drums bashing away on the soundtrack, and yet the film keeps piling on more and more and more of them.

With all due respect to Miller's bonkers vision, and his incredible ability to put that vision on screen, Furiosa seems like one of those spin-off graphic novels that plug the gaps between two films in a franchise, but which don't quite match up to the films themselves.

★★★☆☆

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