Anya’s just fabulous as a post-apocalyptic warrior queen... it’s Top Gear on steroids
THERE might be another actress under 30 with a more varied and exciting set of credits than Anya Taylor-Joy but if there is, it’s hard to think who. And now, to the chess prodigy she played in the hit TV drama The Queen’s Gambit, to the possessed 17th-century Puritan in The Witch and the abused 1960s nightclub singer in Last Night In Soho, she adds a post-apocalyptic warrior queen. It was probably only a matter of time.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which had its world premiere last night at the Cannes Film Festival, is an absolute blast from start to finish, a worthy prequel to that high-octane 2015 blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road. It is utterly stunning on the eye, decidedly loud on the ear, and a thousand-watt jolt to the spirits. I loved it.
Taylor-Joy is fabulous as Furiosa, the alphafind female with much to be furious about, likewise Alyla Browne who plays the title character as a girl.
But as ever the prize laurels belong to Australian director George Miller, pushing 80 now yet still firmly in command of the petrol-soaked dystopian world he created 45 years ago in the original Mad Max.
Here, a voiceover tells us that ‘gangs are marauding like locusts across the land’. Frankly, it would be disappointing if they weren’t. Miller needs marauding gangs like other storytellers need star-crossed lovers.
Unsubtly, unabashedly, he feeds off classic Westerns such as John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece The Searchers to set up the tale of spirited young Furiosa, abducted from a peaceful oasis by raddled Hell’s Angels types who find her sabotaging their bikes.
Eventually, with her formidable mother (Charlee Fraser) giving frantic chase across a parched desert, she falls into the hands of the charismatic, messianic warlord Dementus, exhilaratingly played by a scarcely recognisable Chris Hemsworth like a cross between El Cid and Charles Manson.
You only need to scan the cast list to see how much fun Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris had with all this: The People Eater, Rakka the Brackish, The Octoboss, Smeg, Fang, Scrotus, Treadmill Rat. And as if there weren’t already oodles for motorbike enthusiasts to relish, there’s also a Mr Norton and a Mr Harley.
Not, I should add, that you need to be a petrol-head to enjoy this beguilingly bonkers vision of rival biker hordes at war over oil and whatever else they can to fuel their enmity – I’m not. Indeed, I’ve admitted before that I don’t know a Harley-Davidson from Jim Davidson. But if you cherish first-class escapism, presented with tremendous swagger, then this movie is well worth two and a half hours of your time.
Back to the plot. Furiosa finds a courageous ally, Pretorian Jack (Tom Burke), who pledges to teach her the secrets of ‘road war’ as she attempts to flee this hellscape and get back to the Green Place of Many Mothers, whence she came.
But she also has vengeance in mind. ‘You have about you a purposeful savagery,’ Jack tells Furiosa, approvingly. It’s a line that exemplifies a script written with intelligence and wit. ‘There’s no shame in hate,’ Dementus says later. ‘It’s one of the great forces of nature.’
Hate, and the urge to control this wasteland, is what drives Dementus into a war with his enemy Immortan Joe – with Furiosa and Jack caught up in the thunderous crossfire.
We first met Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road and though he’s now played by another actor (Lachy Hulme, following the death in 2020 of Hugh Keays-Byrne), he again looks, if you can possibly picture it, like Hannibal Lecter crossed with the late Peter Stringfellow. I know that’s another cross to bear but then the movie itself is a kind of mad hybrid: Western, biblical epic, sci-fi fantasy, Top Gear on steroids, with a look as if the design brief had been handed to Salvador Dali.
Miller admitted this week, by the way, that the set of Fury Road a decade ago was a deeply unhappy place, scarred by the tension between co-stars Charlize Theron, who played the mature Furiosa so splendidly, and a recalcitrant Tom Hardy. Thank heavens it didn’t make Miller jack it in. This is event-cinema at its best, the hit of the Cannes Film Festival so far.
■ FURIOSA: A Mad Max Saga is released in Irish cinemas on May 24