High octane, top gear

MAD MAX

Monday, ITV4, 9pm

MAD MAX 2

Tuesday, ITV4, 9pm

MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME Wednesday, ITV4, 9pm

BETWEEN 1979 and 1985, Australian director George Miller shot a series of three violent, dystopian films which made a star of their lead – Mel Gibson – and put the name Max Rockatansky into the pantheon of all-time action movie greats. Here ITV4 presents them in a triple bill, albeit one spread over consecutive week nights.

Everyone has their favourite. Mad Max, the opener and the most defiantly low budget, gives Max’s origin story and introduces his iconic car, a supercharged V8 GT Falcon Pursuit Special.

The setting is the Australia of the near-future, a place where motorbike gangs run riot, and law and order has broken down – or almost: Rockatansky is a highway patrol man charged with keeping the highways relatively safe. When tragedy strikes, Max embarks on a quest for vengeance. After that it’s all about survival at any cost as Miller ramps up the postapocalyptic aspect which will inform the next two instalments as well as the acclaimed 2015 reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road. With Tom Hardy now in the title role, it won six Oscars from 10 nominations.

Rolling Stone magazine’s

Greatest Action Movies Ever list will have you believe Mad Max 2 is the best of the lot, and there’s certainly a case to be made.

It introduces Bruce Spence as the pilot of a steampunk gyro-copter, and brings a whiff of High Plains Drifter to a story which sees Max (now accompanied by a faithful dog) defend a community of settlers (they just happen to have a makeshift oil refinery, so his motives aren’t entirely altruistic).

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is absolutely bonkers and features a cargo cult centred on a crashed airliner and a place called Bartertown overseen by the fearsome Aunt Entity – or Tina Turner, as she’s better known. It’s not quite in the spirit of COP26, but if it’s high octane thrills you want, spend your week with Max Max.

RED NOTICE Netflix, now streaming

Utterly preposterous from start to finish but great fun nonetheless, this light-hearted crime caper marks the third collaboration between writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber and Dwayne Johnson, everybody’s favourite ex-wrestler.

So far Thurber has cast Johnson as an ex-FBI agentturned-security expert (Skyscraper) and an on-the-run CIA agent (Central Intelligence).

He doesn’t stray much from that formula here (mind you, having voiced a shapeshifting demi-god in Disney’s Muana, you wouldn’t say Johnson doesn’t have range. Not to his face, anyway).

The big man is John Hartley, an FBI profiler hunting audacious art thief Nolan

Booth (Ryan Reynolds) in the company of Interpol’s Inspector Das (Ritu Arya). The back story involves three bling-tastic golden eggs which were presented to Cleopatra by Marc Anthony as a token of his love. The

whereabouts of two of them are known – one is in a museum in Rome, the other is owned by an international arms dealer known as Sotto Voce (Chris Diamantopoulos) – but the third is apparently lost.

Anybody who can find it and deliver all three to an Egyptian billionaire by the time of his daughter’s wedding, however, stands to make a princely sum.

Tipped off by another art thief, known only as The Bishop, Hartley and Das rock up in

Rome in time to catch Booth in the act of stealing the first egg. Catch, but not actually catch: he escapes on a moped and hightails it to his James Bond villain lair in Bali.

Not to be outdone, Hartley and Das are waiting there when he arrives. Well, I did say it was preposterous.

In Bali, the egg is retrieved and placed under lock and key. Only it isn’t, because The Bishop (Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot) manages to steal it from under everyone’s noses. On top of that she frames Hartley, who ends up in a scary Russian prison sharing a cell with Booth.

And so their odd couple routine begins, with Hartley trying to clear his name and catch The Bishop, and Booth aiming to still collect all three eggs (and a fat cheque from the Egyptian billionaire) as well as always having the last word in any argument.

The script is genuinely funny, the action sequences are slick

(so they should be: Red Notice is rumoured to be Netflix’s most expensive film to date) and there are knowing nods to Wonder Woman and Raiders Of The Lost Ark (Reynolds whistles the theme tune at one point).

And it all ties up just loosely enough for you to know there’s going to be a sequel.

Trigger warning: Ed Sheeran appears playing himself.

It’s not quite in the spirit of COP26 but if it’s high octane thrills you want, spend your week with Max Max

Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky in the Mad Max trilogy, and Gal Gadot as The Bishop in Red Notice