Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

By: Mike Ward on Thursday, May 23

R Running Time: 148 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

For nearly a decade, fans of Mad Max: Fury Road have been waiting for George Miller to return to the Wasteland. His prequel to Fury Road is one of the most anticipated films of 2024.
A spectacle, with a terrific performance in the opening stanza by young actor Alyla Browne, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is going to please fans of this franchise with its go-for-broke stunts and action sequences and violent mayhem.
From a technical standpoint, movies simply don’t look like Mad Max movies. This is cinematic craftsmanship of the highest order.

NO

If you are not emotionally invested in the story, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is going to be a very long sit. Very long.
How much you can tolerate Chris Hemsworth’s goofy, charismatic performance is a factor in how you enjoy the film. For me, he threatened to overwhelm Miller’s rambunctious action sequences - which is saying a lot.
Outside of Charlize Theron’s specific story in Fury Road, nothing much has hooked me from a storytelling standpoint in either that film or Furiosa. Maybe you don’t need a story or characters to interest you - you simply want carnage, stunts, and OMG and WTF moments to serve as your entertainment. Cool. To each their own.

OUR REVIEW

For me, the strength of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga exists in approximately the film’s first half hour. This is where we meet our title character, portrayed by a tremendous Alyla Browne, who embodies Furiosa at 10 years old, setting in motion the origin story of a character who will lose her innocence and soon see the world around her as a hardened, bloodthirsty landscape. Heightening this harsh reality: her abduction by the mercenaries of ruthless warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).

In her early years, and for those who recall Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa resides in “The Green Place of Many Mothers,” a community of great abundance. As a young girl, she will soon realize that what her village has, others do not - and Dementus steals her away in his endless attempt at seizing things he covets. After a failed rescue attempt by Furiosa’s mother, Mary (Charlee Fraser), Dementus plans to keep the young girl as his own while he enacts larger plans: Taking over the Citadel and ruling the vast Wasteland where George Miller’s Mad Max films take place.

Browne more than holds her own in that first section, providing a much-needed heart and soul to a film that becomes cacophonus and dizzying in a theatrical setting. Hemsworth is in full on “ACTING(!!!)” mode, vamping tirelessly with every line reading and interaction he shares on screen. While undoubtedly the bronzed, buffed and ripped actor is having a fantastic time as Dementus, he delivers a performance which, at times, begins to strangle even Miller’s limitless vision for the Mad Max world he has created.

What also makes Browne’s work so impressive is that she gives us emotional stakes in the game. Rugged enough to chew through a gas line with her teeth, while also reminding Dementus of the family he once lost, Browne captures a youthful Furiosa’s strength, resolve, and determination, with the perfect mix of vulnerability. I easily could have enjoyed a Mad Max movie with Browne in the leading role. As her performance steps aside for the arrival of Anya Taylor-Joy’s appearance as an older, hardened, tough-as-nails fighter, Miller and co-writer Nick Lathouris seem to lose a handle on what they have built up to that point. The movie feels stuck between crafting events of stunt and spectacle, coming at the sacrifice of nurturing along a meaningful story that makes all of this mayhem matter.

Though there is nothing as groundbreaking and jaw-dropping as what Miller and his team delivered in the 2015 Fury Road, this prequel delivers several impressive action sequences. Much has been written about a 15-minute centerpiece in the film which has everything from people clinging to and fighting underneath the bottom of a vehicle going at breakneck speed, to mercenaries flat out murdering folks with fiery, flaming spears that explode on contact and decimate the people they hit. Bodies are flying everywhere, people are getting shot, ripped from vehicles, destroyed left and right.

Edited crisp and precise by Miller’s wife, Margaret Sixel, and Eliot Knapman, with Simon Duggan’s cinematography desperately trying to capture everything Miller has created, what’s perhaps even more amazing is that with all of this happening, Furiosa still cannot quite measure up to Fury Road’s groundbreaking practical effects work and innovative, iconic stunt choreography.

Audiences with a predilection to Mad Max cinema will nonetheless be smitten - trying to absorb everything they see and escape deep inside a movie that seeks to amaze and entertain. As this writer learned back in 2015, to be critical of a Mad Max film is commensurate with professional blasphemy. As I wrote back when that film was released, I found Fury Road’s rather uninteresting opening act disappointing. It is when the movie turns the narrative over to Charlize Theron, who gives a fantastic and moving performance and uses that emotion to build to one of the most insane final hours of action I have ever seen, that praise was still not enough. Colleagues criticized me as “not liking movies anymore.” Someone told me I should “hang it up” and I was even dubbed a “contrarian” for the first time in my movie reviewing life.

Nine years later, here’s my latest, if not obvious, hot take: Furiosa is no Fury Road. The story only really feels important when Browne has our full attention. Hemsworth is enjoyable for awhile, but ultimately chews up a bit too much of the dusty, blood-soaked scenery around him. And if you are wondering why I haven’t mentioned Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance up to this point, there’s a reason. There isn’t a whole lot there beyond some impressive physicality.

Truth is, I found the talented actor appearing overwhelmed - committed to the role, sure, but almost in too deep. As the connective tissue between Browne and Theron, Taylor-Joy never quite connects the dots between lost innocence, heartbreak and vulnerability and defiant, heroic feminist warrior.

In the end, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is going to be exactly what Mad Max enthusiasts are waiting for: an action movie full of violence and stunt sequences which return viewers to the mythical, largely desolate Wasteland that has given them legendary characters and memories.

I love that for them. I do. For the rest of us, mileage certainly does vary.

CAST & CREW

Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, George Shevtsov, Lachy Hulme, John Howard, Angus Sampson, Charlee Fraser, Elsa Pataky, Nathan Jones, Josh Helman, David Field, Rahel Romahn, Goran Kleut

Director: George Miller
Written by: George Miller, Nick Lathouris
Release Date: May 24, 2024
Warner Bros.

For nearly a decade, fans of Mad Max: Fury Road have been waiting for George Miller to return to the Wasteland. His prequel to Fury Road is one of the most anticipated films of 2024.

A spectacle, with a terrific performance in the opening stanza by young actor Alyla Browne, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is going to please fans of this franchise with its go-for-broke stunts and action sequences and violent mayhem.

From a technical standpoint, movies simply don’t look like Mad Max movies. This is cinematic craftsmanship of the highest order.

If you are not emotionally invested in the story, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is going to be a very long sit. Very long.

How much you can tolerate Chris Hemsworth’s goofy, charismatic performance is a factor in how you enjoy the film. For me, he threatened to overwhelm Miller’s rambunctious action sequences - which is saying a lot.