The latest installment in the Mad Max series, Furiosa, had the potential to be a feminist prequel that was actually worth watching, but it ended up being a massive flop.
Furiosa is the fifth installment in legendary Australian director George Miller’s decades-long series. It comes nearly a decade after the release of Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy and featuring Charlize Theron as the one-armed road warrior Furiosa. Now Anya Taylor-Joy brings her wide-eyed beauty to tell the story of a young Furiosa.
Sure, the movie takes advantage of Hollywood’s current obsession with “tell her story” virtue signaling, but Fury Road is one of the greatest action movies of all time, and Furiosa deserves her own standalone movie, not just a cliché girl boss one. I headed to the theater cautiously optimistic.
I was pleasantly surprised do not have However remarkable the film was, it disappointed me for another reason: it was simply boring, and its running time was two and a half hours. Too long.
What’s great about Fury Road is that it has very little dialogue and almost no traditional character development. Miller throws you into this world with no context whatsoever, deciding to show instead of tell. The result is some of the most thrilling action scenes ever made.
He did the opposite with Furiosa. There was no overarching plot per se. There was just backstory to the war between the Citadel, Gastown and Bullet Farm, and some grander visual world-building. Chris Hemsworth plays a fascinating new villain, Doctor Dementus. But Miller treats the audience to an hour-long intro of young Furiosa before Taylor-Joy even makes an appearance, which could have been cut to 10 minutes at best. The action, once it gets going, is far more sparse, derivative of “Fury Road.”
All we’re left with are a bunch of lines that leave too little to the imagination, or worse, boastful monologues. That’s as far as the film goes. Max is a good old-fashioned action hero of few words, but Miller felt his female hero needed to have depth and complexity. Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa was no girlboss, but she was intensely introspective for a world long since devoid of therapists.
We can only be grateful that the left didn’t get enraged over Chris Hemsworth’s giant prosthetic nose.
