Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) – Review

In 2015, filmmaker George Miller gave action cinema the fuel injected nitro boost we never knew it needed when he raised the Mad Max franchise from its sandy grave in the wasteland and took us on a balls out trip down Fury Road. The result was, to quote the similarly majestic Mad Max 2 “a white line nightmare” that threw away the rule book, rewrote it, and then threw it away again in a way that felt utterly new in a way that felt like it could never be duplicated.
Of course, it could be duplicated – after all, Fury Road is essentially the chassis of The Road Warrior pimped to the nth degree, but when news broke that the movie’s breakout character – Charlize Theron’s resplendently buzz-cutted, metal-armed Imperator Furiosa – was going to get her very own prequel, my expectations went into overdrive. After all, prequels can be something of a mixed bag that even tripped up the likes of George Lucas and Peter Jackson in the past, so does George Miller have it in him to make it epic?
Witness him, blood bags. Again.

It’s time to head back to the Wasteland, the scorched, dystopian desert of a radiaction scarred Australia of the future, but we usually follow the brutal adventures of the enigmatic wander known as Max, this time we focus on the origins of Furiosa, the fierce Imperator of wheezy warlord Immortan Joe and driver of the intimidating War Rig. However, it wasn’t always like that and in a story that’s set out over numerous chapters, we discover how a child from one of the last fertile places in the country, the Green Place Of Many Mothers, managed to find her soul hardened like a callous by the daily regime of unrelenting brutality.
It starts with a chance meeting with a band of marauding bikers who discover this land of abundance, take young Furiosa hostage and tear back across the desert to tell the vain, egotistical biker warlord, Dementus, of their findings. However, hot on their tales is Mary, Furiosa’s warrior mother, who manages to whittle down the bikers and succeed in keeping the Green Place a secret, but fails to stop her daughter becoming a slave of a man who could best be described as a couple of bolts shy of a camshaft.
Years pass, and as Dementus leads his biker horde aimlessly through the desert, they happen by chance across a stranded War Boy, a half-life foot soldier of the uber warlord Immortan Joe who rules over a trio of strongholds – the Citadel: which supplies water, milk and food; Gastown: a massive refinery that provides the “guzzoline” that keeps things moving and the Bullet Farm: which naturally provides copious ammunition.
Seeing his opportunity to get his greedy fingers into Joe’s cruel pie, Dementus strives to elbow his way into the power structure any way he can and as a result, Furiosa finds herself now in the care of the callous Joe. However, as the years pass and her rage rises, Furiosa finds her hate becoming a useful motivator as she ascends through the Citadel’s ranks to get her long awaited chance to take out the man who took her from her lush and verdant home.

It’s a genuine pleasure to say that Furiosa, while not admittedly quite up to the same calibre as Fury Road, is still a magnificent addition to the Mad Max cannon which, despite painting Australia as a vicious shithole for over 45 years now, still apparently has an abundance of fuel still in the gas tank. Impressively, Miller chooses not to present yet another chase movie and instead reconfigures the world of Fury Road into a sprawling, biblical epic which sees its fledgling hero buffeted and forged by the conflicting wills of numerous, batshit, warlords. It’s interesting that the previous movie deliberately made Max something of a Sergio Leone-style passenger in his own vehicle as the main thrust of Fury Road’s plot took in Furiosa’s struggle to finally get back to the Green Place, mainly because her own movie sort of does the same to her in favour of laying out the complex power struggles between the epically pasty Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme replacing the sadly departed Hugh Keays-Burne) and psychotically petulant Dementus. However, like Tom Hardy in that later/earlier adventure (bloody prequel logic) Anya Taylor-Joy does a little with a lot as she takes over from Charlize Theron with only around thirty words in the whole film and manages to be more than up for the task ahead of her. Watching Furiosa slowly creep her way from child slave, all the way up to a one-armed, gease-smeared warrior is tremendously gratifying as the actress does more with a glare from those hubcap-sized eyes of hers than most people manage with an entire page of dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, it’s almost fitting that a near-mute hero has an antagonist afflicted with an uncontrollable amount of verbal diarrhea and Chris Hemsworth’s vainglorious Dementus proves to be a vastly entertaining foil as her jabbers endless bullshit through fake teeth and a false nose. Channeling the bluster of Thor with that cult leader he played in Bad Times At The El Royal, he proves to be a lethal idiot, who rapidly talks the talk, but ultimately wrecks everything he gets his hands on due to the fact that he is, in essence, a spoiled, entitled idiot with an army behind him.
However, once again, the real star here is the caustic, deranged sandbox that George Miller has created and Furiosa manages to effortly break the curse of the prequel thanks to a shift in storytelling style. While Fury Road conveyed its world building in expertly deployed shots to give you just enough information to get the point, Furiosa is free to dive in in detail, giving us a more thorough look at how the world of Immortan Joe’s kingdom actually works as it actually takes up to places only hinted or glimpsed at before. Thus we get that rarest of things – a prequel that actually introduces us to a world with more detail that the “first” film does, making it feel that it fits tighter than Furiosa’s prosthetic arm. However, it does come at a slight cost.
The shift from a breakneck pace that’s set over a couple of days, to a long, slower tale than unfolds over decades may irritate those who wanted more drive from the film; but even though the frantic action isn’t pedal to the metal this time around, Miller still delivers action sequences so complex and huge, it’s impossible not to just sit there and goggle at its grotesque splendor.

In a time where some action films have become as disposable as one of Joe’s War Boys, its reassuring to know that Miller still knows how to bring the crunch and screech of twisted metal that can still rattle your teeth from the back row. However, now the real race is on – because with rumours swirling around that Miller has plans to deliver us a final Mad Max tale set in the Wasteland one year before the events of Fury Road, we could be on the cusp of possibly one of the finest, modern action trilogies ever.
Until then, witnessing this furious world is still as shiny and chrome as it’s ever been.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟