"Mad Max: Fury Road"

If you liked "The Road Warrior" you're basically getting that. Just take the middle out and inject it with chick flick notions and...there you have this movie. While viscerally wonderful, the high praise for this movie is really strange. I mean, it was past the 90% in Rotten Tomatoes. It has a lot of moments where you do wonder if people have died, but as far as their assessment of very little CGI and most things practical. I call bullshit. Especially when a large portion of the movie have people literally flying from burning wreckage and being sucked into a volcanic tornado. NOT CGI? C'mon.

In fact, the movie should never have been called "Mad Max" since he does very little in the movie. He is reactive, and punished in this version of post apocalypse. Very little is unique in terms of storyline of resources being tapped. What is unique are the characters he milks from the outer regions of shit. And there is generally no purpose for the makeup, costuming nor the intricate impractical doo-dads other than for wow factor. "Thunderdome..." is infinitely better. Because it's a great slow burn. Plus, Mel Gibson looks nuts. And his version of Max, you buy. Tom Hardy looks bored. And he's really rude to women for no reason..maybe his reason is a flashback past that we get flashes of. Really, jarring disjointed and hardly mystery inducing flashes. Mel was front and center while this new version has Tom Hardy completely missing in some scenes.

I do say, there are great things about this film. That it doesn't care about human life (even though the undercurrent is a preservation of it). Didn't stop them from using bodies as trip plates for very menacing vehicles. It's an angry movie. But an adventure nonetheless.

You know what I REALLY miss about these movies? That it was ultimately about a greater society. Here, we're presented the ultimate outcome, and you feel like you are owed something, but there are a TON of questions you're still left with. Especially since the society they left seems to have spent a generation that was undone by a mere few minutes. In "Thunderdome..." we know Auntie is still the boss. Leaving us with "Aren't we a pair...raggedy man." THAT sums up so much more than a few tender spots this re-boot (NOT a sequel) misses.

I don't think this fits in with anything the previous movies were about. That's fine. It's rebooting the franchise, which I'm sure the next installment will be better. Much like "The Road Warrior" was better than "Mad Max." And most likely a third installment which will hopefully trump the rest. I really miss crazy Mel.