MADDER MAX

Think Fast And Furious meets Duran Duran’s Wild Boys and you have...

Some of you may be old enough to remember the music video made by Duran Duran to promote their 1984 single The Wild Boys; the rest of you can look it up on YouTube. Costing more than $1m to make and sensational to look at, it saw bassist John Taylor tied to a car roof, guitarist Andy Taylor bound – guitar-inhand – to a ship’s figurehead and, most memorably of all, lead vocalist Simon Le Bon lashed to a windmill sail that dunked his head in a dark pool every time it turned. Well, Mad Max: Fury Road – the first Mad Max film for 30 years – is a lot like that video.

But that’s not because Duran Duran were so far ahead of creative time; it’s because Mad Max – not so much the low-budget original film from 1979 but certainly the hugely popular 1981 sequel, Mad Max

2: The Road Warrior – was already having an influence on popular culture. And it’s gone on inspiring artists working in film, theatre, dance, even circus, ever since. Yes, the punk-post-apocalypse all starts with Mad Max, a fact that its now 70-year-old Australian creator, George Miller, enthusiastically celebrates with Fury Road and which the 68th Cannes Film Festival last week honoured with an Out of Competition gala screening.

This is not the sort of franchise reboot we’re used to – it doesn’t go back to the beginning and tell the whole story all over again or explore the character’s brooding dark side in greater detail. No, despite the fact that Tom Hardy takes over from Mel Gibson in the title role, this is essentially

Mad Max 4, offering more of the same, except bigger, louder and, er, a lot crashier than ever before.

Devotees, both of the franchise and the genre, I’m sure will love it, as will a whole new generation of teenage fans. But others, myself to some extent included, may think that thanks to the enduring and pervasive influence of the original trio of films ( Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, memorably co- starring Tina Turner, completed the set in 1985), for all the undeniably spectacular crash, bang, wallop, it’s frankly little that we haven’t seen before.

It begins in a manner that calls to mind that great Hammer adaptation of Rider Haggard’s classic She, for the Warlord – alternatively known as Immortan Joe – commands his rocky Citadel as if he were some sort of deity. With cave-dwelling slaves providing their own percussive soundtrack (strangely, King Julian, the lemur king in

Madagascar, also comes to mind), his thunderous word is law and, in a barren world desperately short of water, the starving, diseased masses that live below his mountaintop home only drink when he opens the sluice gates. Which he doesn’t do very often.

So he’s definitely not the sort of man who’s going to be pleased when one of his most trusted lieutenants, Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa (silly names have always been part of the Mad Max fun, even if it does all get a bit Frankie Howerd at times), makes off with five of his favourite and

‘The Namib desert locations are fabulous and the script is peppererd with humour and

references to earlier films’

most beautiful young wives. One of them, The Splendid Angharad (played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), is even carrying his child. ‘Warlord Jr,’ she grimaces, ‘he’s going to be so ugly.’

She’s not wrong. Ever since Mad Max 2, grotesque has always been a key element of the franchise and Miller (it’s almost impossible to believe the same man both wrote and directed the children’s penguin cartoon Happy Feet) certainly goes to town here with dwarves and amputees all fighting for screen space with the goitred and the tumour-ridden. Even Furiosa, who seems to have borrowed her oily warpaint look from Adam Ant, is missing a lower arm.

Hardy is a brave man three times over. First for taking on the role that Gibson made truly iconic; second for sharing top billing and screen time with Theron; and thirdly for playing the first half-hour behind a muzzle (albeit one fashioned from a garden fork) despite the wretched time he endured as the similarly constrained and therefore largely unintelligible Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

Here at least the traditions of the franchise are on his side – Max never gets a lot of words. He’s a brooding road-warrior, haunted by the nightmares of his past, searching for the ‘righteous cause’ that might offer him redemption. Saving Furiosa and her girls might just be that cause, even if his first desert encounter with them does look as if he’s stumbled across a magazine shoot for lost supermodels.

Mad Max films have never been known for the quality of their acting but Hardy and Theron are fine, as is Nicholas Hoult, playing Nux, one of the Citadel’s war-boys who, when about to die for their leader, martyr themselves with a squoosh of metallic paint and cries of ‘All shiny and chrome!’ and ‘Witness me!’ helps at the gates of Valhalla, apparently.

The Namib desert locations are fabulous and Miller peppers his script with humour and references to earlier films in the series. Yes, severed hands, recycled boots and feisty old women with guns all feature, as does a human treadmill in the Citadel which, along with the very silly truck that thunders into battle carrying a huge bank of speakers and a manic electric guitarist suspended on bungees, took me right back to Simon Le Bon and that windmill.

Yes, Mad Max is back and, while its frantic mix of guns, gasoline and mashed-up vehicles won’t be for everyone, wild boys will definitely approve.