It’s useless. Buzzing around about things that have gone well is a profession for very few. And it isn’t among them George Miller with Furiosa – A Mad Max saga, director and prequel to Mad Max:Fury Road (2015). The two films are narratively linked, that is, how Princess Furiosa ends up with a mechanical arm, causing the brides of the despotic Immortam Joe to escape, and being chased in the desert for more than two hours of Fury Road by a caravan of mad madmen smeared with white who praise Valhalla. Two films which, however, are also totally unrelated precisely in the frenzy of the action mechanisms and in the unstoppable singularity of the staging which vanish in Furiosa, in the intrusiveness of the sound drone which in the prequel becomes an anonymous and dull tinsel.
Furiosa – fifth chapter of the Mad Max saga that began in 1979 with Mel Gibson – is frankly a fiasco of very large proportions, a watering down of the fatty broth that Miller had incredibly begun to cook again with unlimited and happy creativity after years of talking pigs and penguins. Therefore, nothing was really enough to slide into aesthetic kitsch as well as into the quagmire of dramaturgical inconclusiveness and Miller succeeded by recalling the escape and kidnapping of Furiosa as a child by a sadistic and violent group of marauders led by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) who also kills her mother. Then the noble girl grows up from a dirty and filthy derelict, and by exploiting the comings and goings of the precious tanker truck convoys she will be able to take revenge on the bad Dementus by making an impromptu pact of trust with the lazy Immortam Joe (here played behind a toothy iron grin by Lachy Hulme replacing Hugh Keays-Byrne who died in 2020).
The cumbersome and breathless attempt to fit together new spatial scenarios (Gastown and Bullet farm) in addition to the epochal infernal place of the Citadel, in a progressive progression divided into five insignificant chapters, already shows how Furiosa’s scaffolding is trivially shaky. A bit of the first idea that comes to mind (script by Miller and Nico Lathorius) when she presses the request to commercially strike the hot iron of Fury Road as if we were in the folds of an ordinary Rambo. So all that she had left us speechless at Fury Road here it is rehashed in key terribly kitsch.
With those scenographic and costume trinkets of eccentric wildness which are transformed here into heavy prostheses (Hemsworth’s hooked nose and bum don’t look at each other; dolls and hairdresser’s busts held upright on the handlebars of the racing cars are so pathetically stuck together), in brochure pages of the Bavarian camper (the Volkswagen minibus that becomes a down-at-heel means of flame-throwing offense) or of a tacky cinephile quotation (the Ben Hur-style chariot pulled by three supersonic motorbikes).
And if in Fury Road it was the tension of the action that counted and in that tense arc of ultra-rapid advancement fraught with obstacles the psychologies of the individuals emerged as elegantly rough and gradually structured, here the definition of gestures (even athletically poorly calibrated) and words (Dementus una petulant infinity; Furiosa just a couple and boring) are of such a coarse-grained ironic loaf – between Flash Gordon and Lynch’s Dune – that the Z series would have something to outclass them.
Then there is an incomprehensible debacle in the visual effects of a photographic-directorial mix between a palette of dull colors and distorted perspectives so much so that every two minutes, especially in the first hour of filming, it seems like we are clinging to the window of a strange film by Jean -Pierre Jeunet. Ana Taylor-Joyfinally, instead of Charlize Theron, but with the intention of reconstructing the precursors of Theron’s grit and brutal determination, is one of the most off-kilter and out-of-focus casting gambles in the history of cinema. Hopefully the Mad Max thread will be cut here. Other than the opening of Cannes. Probably the most unsuccessful of the entire saga.
