REVIEW: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Movie Reviews

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a mess of a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It can’t decide if it’s a revenge movie, a futuristic crime film, or, oddly enough, a Mad Max movie. What it does know is that it isn’t very interested in its title character, as Furiosa is the least important part of her own film. It also suffers from a particularly strong dose of prequelitis. On the plus side, it’s visually impressive – for the most part – and has a great score, so it’s not a waste of time if you want to see some good technical filmmaking.

As a child, Furiosa is kidnapped by the forces of Lord Dementus, a warlord who conquers other societies and absorbs them into his ranks as he steals their resources. When Dementus declares war on rival warlord Immortan Joe, Furiosa is caught in the middle, going from traded commodity to worker to warrior as she hopes for revenge.

Furiosa feels like two movies shoved into one, which helps explain why it’s longer than it should be (almost two and a half hours, longer than any of the Mad Max films). One follows Furiosa as she grows to adulthood and seeks revenge on Dementus (not that there’s much seeking, but she’d like some revenge if it ever becomes available), while the other is about Dementus’ war with Immortan Joe for control of Joe’s captured resources. George Miller could have made a good film out of either of these ideas, but mashed together, you can feel when one movie stops and the other takes over. Furiosa spends more time with the second, and the back and forth between Dementus and Joe takes up a lot of the film; unfortunately, this doesn’t leave Furiosa with much to do. She’s mostly a spectator in what is essentially a mob war and only an active participant during the second half of the movie when she’s all but forced into it.

This also results in Furiosa having almost no character development. The seeds for her revenge are planted early; after that, she’s either absent from the narrative or being moved from one circumstance to the next and, outside of one or two instances where she makes a decision or two, just going with the flow. She’s a boring protagonist, much more so than she was in Fury Road (where she had a personality), and that makes it hard to invest in the movie. I didn’t care if Furiosa got her revenge because I didn’t care about Furiosa. It’s hard to say if Anya Taylor-Joy gives a good or bad performance because she’s got nothing to work with; she’s just kind of there for most of her screen time, like Furiosa is. (And she doesn’t show up until a little past the halfway point; for the bulk of the movie, Furiosa is a little girl played by Alyla Browne, who, similarly, doesn’t have much to do.)

None of the actors have much to do, really, and the characters are all either dull or over-the-top goofballs. The latter includes Dementus, the villain played by Chris Hemsworth. Dementus is too silly and exaggerated to ever feel like the threat he should be, and while Hemsworth gives it his all, he’s a lightweight compared to all of the Max Max villains who preceded him. (Yep, even Tina Turner.) Imorten Joe (played this time by Lachy Hulme due to Hugh Keays-Byrne’s unfortunate passing) is more intimidating, of course, but he’s ultimately a side character, and his presence mostly just diminishes Dementus’ menace. No one else registers; there are evil henchmen on both sides who are either goofy or unimportant, Joe’s harem who are just background players in a couple of scenes, and Furiosa’s mother, who’s only in about fifteen minutes of the film (but is the best character by far). But the weirdest character of all is Praetorian Jack, played by Tom Burke. Jack is one of Joe’s soldiers, but he’s also basically Mad Max. He dresses like Max, he serves the same function as Max (get gas from place to place, fight bad guys in vehicular action sequences, be stoic and cool, have a shotgun), and he becomes a sort of mentor to Furiosa. Unlike Max, Jack is dull as dishwater, and Tom Burke doesn’t have the presence or charisma of Mel Gibson. But he’s clearly the stand-in for Max.

Jack’s presence makes Furiosa even more frustrating. With some very easy rewrites, this could have simply been a Mad Max movie. Dump the Furiosa stuff, have Dementus be at war with a different warlord, and put Max in the middle. It could be a sci-fi take on A Fistful of Dollars/Yojimbo/The Glass Key (or Red Harvest, depending on your view of it), with Max playing two evil guys against each other and ultimately having to take them both out. It feels like a similar movie got mashed into a Furiosa origin that is even less necessary than I thought it was. Making this even more glaring is Furiosa’s constant references, callbacks, and outright copying of scenes from the Mad Max movies. There’s the villain getting on a loudspeaker to try to convince a town he wants to conquer to surrender (after being introduced by a henchman), an action sequence involving the Max character driving a tanker full of gas while marauders are attacking it, a henchman who runs around on all fours and acts like a dog, and the murdered family member being the impetus for revenge. Jack even refers to what they do as “road war.” It’s like the film is mocking us, rubbing our noses in what we want while giving us something else – something I can’t imagine even those excited for a Furiosa solo movie wanted.

On a technical level, Furiosa is very well made, and I almost want to recommend it just for the visuals. Unlike most, I wasn’t crazy about Fury Road on that score; it was so hyper-stylized that it started to feel more like a music video than a movie, and it didn’t have nearly the impact of Mad Max or The Road Warrior. In the beginning, I worried Furiosa would follow suit, and the early action scenes have a lot of that sped-up, overly zoomy filming. But Miller wisely tunes it down as the film goes on, and the result is a much better visual style, more in keeping with his earlier Mad Max movies while still being its own thing. The later action scenes look great as a result, with action that is both fluid and kinetic. The excellent score helps as well, a thunderstorm of crashing music that sells the danger permeating the wasteland and the violence it takes to survive it. It’s a shame Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris couldn’t have used them to tell a better story.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a jumble of at least two movies forced together to create an overlong, soulless waste of time. Visually, it’s stupendous, and it’s almost worth seeing for that, but there’s nothing to care about other than the pretty things on the screen.