Tormented drivetime epic has max factor
They drive all the way over here, and then they drive all the way over there. It’s the bare nuts and bolts of Mad Max: Fury Road, and yet there was no question that George Miller’s gnarly 2015 monster was anything other than a gold-plated classic when it roared into view.
More than any of the three previous Mad Max instalments, Fury Road had a sweep and spectacle to it that delivered a sustained operatic kilter. Out went Mel Gibson, in came extraordinary action set-pieces, widescreen location filming (in the deserts of Namibia) and, in Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, an iconic heroine to prevail in Miller’s bonkers badlands.
And bonkers they truly were, both in presentation and production. Vast sets, an army of cast and crew, flamethrowers and full-throttle machinery punctuating every note of the screenplay. How did the production negotiate the constant threat of on-set calamity, we asked ourselves, fists clamped to our seat arms. How was no one killed.
Prior to filming Fury Road , an origins story for Theron’s teaktough amputee had been carefully devised in the conceptual world-building of Miller and co-scribe Nico Lathouris. The intention had been a lavish anime project someday, but Miller came to see that Furiosa merited her own big-screen prequel.
Could any follow-up match what the fourth and greatest Mad Max outing achieved? Probably not, but Furiosa does manage to be everything we could hope for from a return to this parched dystopia: warped, hideous survivors riding beastly contraptions; the cold, vengeful bite of a samurai epic held up against a world cooked dead by our machinery.
This eco-thread is murmured audibly in the intro. Ten-year-old Furiosa (Alyla Browne) forages in the Green Place of Many Mothers, an arcadian outpost powered by renewables and seemingly the last bastion of civility in the scorched nothingness of the Australian continent. In an incredible opening prologue, she is kidnapped by a band of raiders and brought before Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the camply messianic warlord of a biker horde.
Despite the folly of our ways, fossil fuels are still bickered over, as is fresh water. It puts Dementus on a collision course with Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the muzzled tyrant of Fury Road and leader of the Citadel. A barter agreement exists between it and Gastown, a fuel-producing fortress, and following a botched attempt to seize the Citadel, Dementus proposes an alliance to suit all three parties. Furiosa, now approaching child-bearing age, becomes part of the deal and remains at the Citadel.
She is imprisoned with the rest of Immortan Joe’s harem of chattel wives, only to escape and disguise herself as part of his salvage crew. Her only goal is revenge.
Now in her mid-20s (and played by Anya Taylor-Joy), she sees an opportunity in Jack (Tom Burke), the driver of the “War Rig” moving shipments between the Citadel and Gastown. He doesn’t so much run the gauntlet as live on it, and when Furiosa helps him fend off a high-speed hijacking, a partnership forms.
Like any good western, Furiosa delivers its best lines where there is no dialogue. Taylor-Joy and Burke gurn and glower at oncoming threats. Hemsworth cackles away in a grating Aussie accent and sports a prosthetic honker that only amplifies his brand of absurd menace. It’s the Australian star’s first home-turf role, and one meaty and complex enough to reignite his somewhat difficult post-Thor career.
The analogue hellscape – rendered to life by Fury Road’s Oscar-winning production department – remains a thunderously tormented cinema experience. But Furiosa is markedly (and vitally) different to Fury Road, with its own sensations and rhythms. Wild sequences unspool with the same visceral, kinetic tangibility, but increased CGI use is detectable.
With both production and budget hit with natural disasters and Covid outbreaks, we can forgive the 79-year-old Miller for grabbing any technology to hand.
That whiff of struggle, of nothing coming easy to Miller and the realisation of his outsized vision, is part of why Furiosa will connect just as Fury Road did, albeit without the sheer blindsiding awe of its predecessor. As we brace ourselves for the blandness that AI is set to usher into our lives, it speaks to things worth cherishing more than ever – ambition, adversity and resolve.
THE GARFIELD MOVIE ★★
In cinemas; Cert G
The new Garfield film is obsessed with Tom Cruise. Ving Rhames, an invaluable player in Cruise’s never-ending Mission: Impossible saga, lends his voice to proceedings and – if you’re still awake after the first half – you might notice Lalo Schifrin’s stirring M:I theme during the heist sequence. What, you may ask, is a heist sequence doing in a Garfield flick? There are no easy answers.
Later, a gag about Garfield doing his own stunts, like Tom; another that borrows the score from Top Gun (no, really).
Around all this exists a feckless, flattened animation about a moody orange tabby (Garfield, voiced by a charmless Chris
Pratt) who reunites with his estranged street cat father, Vic (Samuel L Jackson, phoning it in), to rob a state-of-the-art dairy factory (don’t ask).
Somehow, Mark Dindal’s cartoon required the collective brain power of three screenwriters. A sizeable group, and I guess the baby Garfield origins bit is lovely. But the rest is just noise, and there is little evidence to suggest that anyone involved with this ugly, uninspired and largely unfunny feature is even remotely familiar with Jim Davis’s original comic strip. A total catastrophe.
Chris Wasser
PIANO DREAMS ★★★★
Selected cinemas; Cert G
Ken Wardrop’s 2017 documentary Making the Grade was a charming love-in about some special relationships between Irish piano teachers and their pupils. It is a world away from this new film by the great Gary Lennon that brings us to China to see for ourselves an altogether more urgent angle on nurturing young talent.
Piano Dreams prefaces its triptych portrait with a stark figure; there are 40 million piano students currently in China, many of whom don’t have a plan B. We meet a dazzling eight-year-old boy who receives little leeway from his intensely demanding teacher. A 12-year-old girl and a gifted school leaver are praying they make it into prestigious music academies. All are products of not only endless hours of daily practice but also huge sacrifice by their parents, members of China’s fiercely aspirational middle-class for whom children are both an investment and a status symbol.
Between its themes of youth, parenthood and pressure, all to the sonorous beauty of the music itself, there is a real ache to Lennon’s film that you mightn’t see coming. Something cautionary speaks from its fibres about the price of prodigal talent.
Hilary White
IN FLAMES ★★★★
Selected cinemas; Cert 15A
Sinister men and malevolent spirits play treacherous mind games with a young Pakistani woman in Zarrar Kahn’s unsettling psychological drama, In Flames. Mariam (Ramesha Nawal, brilliant) and her mother Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar, likewise) are in mourning. The latter’s father has died – so, too, has her husband, which means the family is now without a patriarch.
The neighbours won’t like that, and though Fariha wishes her daughter would find a husband, Mariam dreams of becoming a doctor and is dedicated to her studies. That is, until Asad (Omar Javaid), a pushy stranger who showers Mariam with compliments, enters the equation.
Meanwhile, an estranged uncle (Adnan Shah Tipu) is keen to look after Fariha’s finances, but can he be trusted? Not likely.
A clever, complex tale of patriarchal oppression in modern-day Karachi, In Flames bears all the usual hallmarks of a grounded social drama – but it also comes with ghosts and fancies itself as a horror.
Fair enough and, despite a muddled third act, Kahn’s film is a hell of a lot better than most mainstream chillers. Seek it out.
Chris Wasser