Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has all the trappings of a prequel that exists to milk a hit movie. Does that matter?
The fifth installation of George Miller's Mad Max series is a roaring good time. (Supplied: Warner Bros. Pictures)
For a 45-year-old franchise that began as a scuzzy, low-budget exploitation movie set in a near-future Australia, George Miller's Mad Max series has extracted a surprising amount of mileage from its rusty tank of guzzoline.
Like any vintage model, though, it's also starting to show some signs of wear and tear in the chassis.
Directed with age-defying vigour by the 79-year-old Miller, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the series' fifth and latest instalment, and a prequel to 2015's widely beloved, Oscar-winning hit Mad Max: Fury Road.
By most measures of action-movie mayhem, Furiosa is a raging good time — but it's also the first film in the series that feels like it's spinning its wheels, at a loss for new ideas to match its execution.
Though conceived in tandem with Fury Road, Furiosa has all the trappings of a prequel that exists to milk a hit movie by filling in backstory — whether or not audiences were exactly clamouring for it.
Just how did Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in the previous film, come to acquire her fearsome cybernetic arm? What was the reason for her buzzcut, anyway? How did she come to be in the employ of the monstrous Immortan Joe, and hatch a plan to betray him? (Admittedly, the arm bit is a doozy.)
At its best, Furiosa is less concerned with answering these questions than exploring the cycle of violence inflicted upon successive generations — a theme that's writ large, if not always elegantly, in its simple tale of revenge.
For the adolescent Furiosa (a wonderful Alyla Browne), the seeds of that violence are sown when she's kidnapped from her lush, verdant homeland and delivered into the clutches of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a warlord who rides a three-motorcycle chariot as he leads his army of scavengers across the Wasteland.
As played by a broad, mugging Hemsworth — complete with prosthetic nose and goofy Australian accent — Dementus isn't the least bit terrifying. The star is far too amiable to be convincingly grotesque, though you're never quite sure when he might snap.
He's certainly not above drawing and quartering his enemies by stringing their limbs to motorbikes, and he's plenty sadistic when confronting Furiosa's mother (Charlee Fraser, whose face was made to fill the movie's stark, widescreen vistas).
Dementus also has crackpot designs on overthrowing the Citadel, the fortress run by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his knucklehead sons Scabrous Scrotus and Rictus Erectus (it's a relief to know Miller's juvenile sense of humour hasn't changed) — which goes about as well as you might expect.
It's soon an all-out war between madmen, with Furiosa caught in between; she's traded into Immortan Joe's service as a future bride, biding her time to exact vengeance.
If Furiosa is too polished to summon the desperation of the earlier Mad Max films, then there's something endearing about Miller's commitment to the series' core spirit, which remains essentially loud, feral and a little bit sentimental.
A sense of hope, however twisted, has always run through the series, and Furiosa — played in the film's second half as a young woman by Anya Taylor-Joy — is one of Miller's most expressive, emotionally rich creations, an avatar of survival against post-apocalyptic adversity.
In a performance of few words (she only has about 30 lines in the whole film), Taylor-Joy gives the Furiosa its blast of star power, bringing the kind of silent-movie intensity the series hasn't seen since Mel Gibson wandered off into the sunset back in the 80s.
For all its sound and fury, many of the film's more memorable moments are its most simple: images of its star set against the vast, elemental landscape, or framed like Joan of Arc on a gate that resembles a burning cross. Taylor-Joy pops against the dirt and grime and the ochre desert, against the grotesque Australian masculinity that has long been the series' gleeful stock in trade.
It's hard not to be entertained by it all, especially when Miller and his stunt team have a monster tow-truck menacing a V8 in a tense chase snaking across the sand dunes, or when they unfurl a parachute that looks like an alien jellyfish bearing down on an oil tanker.
But the storytelling dictates of a prequel appear to have shrunk Miller's vision. The movie's greatest villain isn't Dementus, or even Immortan Joe — it's that shady spectre we might call the Great Expositor, whose love of backstory is scarier than any grill-faced gimp with a chainsaw.
Where each of the previous films introduced new ideas, or progressed the story and theme, Furiosa is more or less content to lap the same premise.
Fury Road already had the whiff of a beefed-up, re-recorded greatest hits set; Furiosa merely recycles the off-cuts, albeit with the best equipment in the game. The series' once-durable mythology is at risk of becoming a brand extension.
In another sense, Furiosa might be said to come full circle to the series' 1979 original, a movie steeped in carnage and loss that set off a cycle of violence from which its hero could never completely escape. (There's even a shot here that mirrors, and up-ends, the first film's grisly image of Max's wife being run down by bandits.)
Yet what was once spare and brutal has become cluttered and over-extended — even if the soul is still there, rattling around somewhere in the engine.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in cinemas now.