Mad Max: Fury Road [4K Ultra-HD] [2015] [Blu-ray] [Region Free]

Slow, uneventful, boring, and subtle. These are some of the words you'd never hear from any sane person describing Mad Max 4. Before I dig deeper I should probably let you know that I'm a twenty year-old man who only recently watched the original Mad Max trilogy, so I don't have any nostalgia attached to them. The first Mad Max film is genuinely considered mediocre by most people apart from proud Aussies, and my opinion was pretty much the same. It didn't leave a particularly lasting impression.The Road Warrior, however, is generally considered as one of the greatest action movies of all time. I was expecting a full-on action fest (much like Fury Road) but unfortunately what I got was a ponderous seventy minutes involving Max titting about with a colony of people protecting fuel before ending with a spectacular car chase. I was quite disappointed and can name several older action films that are far better than The Road Warrior (Terminator 2 and Hard Boiled to name two). Beyond Thunderdome is generally considered as the worst of the lot but to my pleasant surprise I actually enjoyed this the most out of the trilogy! It might have something to do with me being a massive Tina Turner fan, but I thought there was more action and better characters than the other two films.After being largely underwhelmed by the Mad Max trilogy, I had my expectations for Fury Road lowered. Pretty much every review I've read has been astonishingly glowing with many hailing it as one of the best action films of all time, but didn't they say that about The Road Warrior? Fury Road is directed by the same George Miller, a man now in his seventies who hasn't directed an action film since Beyond Thunderdome and whose recent credits include Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City, Mad Max 4 is bound to be pretty weak, right? Wrong.Believe the hype. Mad Max: Fury Road is an incredible feat. I have no idea how George Miller managed to pull out something so utterly spectacular out of his bag. Fury Road is the best action film I've seen since The Raid and has some of the best stunt work since The Dark Knight Rises. In my opinion it leaves the original Mad Max trilogy lying face down in the dust. Fury Road is the great big throbbing war machine whilst the original trilogy is some old rusty bicycle. The first ten minutes of Fury Road is far better than anything from Mad Max 1-3 and the entire two hour film definitely contains far more action than the first three films put together. Fury Road is amazing.It opens with an epic monologue from our new Max, Tom Hardy. Mel Gibson never did anything for me as Max. In fact, the character of Max never did much for me. I much prefer Tom Hardy as Max. His accent may be as muddled as Stu's tan in Mrs. Doubtfire but I think he has much more of a presence than Mel Gibson ever did. His famous interceptor is destroyed within the first five minutes which is obviously symbolic. Just like James Bond getting shot in the opening of Skyfall and a TV exploding in the opening of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the interceptor getting totalled represents a new era of Mad Max. George Miller has completely cut the ties from the original films and quite rightly so! We get thrown into a huge world and feel fully immersed. The imagery is huge and epic. It feels like something from Lord of the Rings with some powerful masked weirdo sitting on a giant cliff and spilling gallons of water to his loyal pale-painted followers. The villain in Fury Road is basically Aunty Entity on acid and curiously similar to Tom Hardy's very own Bane. He's a brilliantly memorable villain who has his very own breast milk farm and an army of seriously sexy wives.It occurred to me about three quarters of a way through the film that I actually cared about the characters on the screen, which I've never felt before during a Mad Max film (apart from Tina of course). The action still comes first, but there's still some character development to keep you interested in the thin plot. Some have complained that Charlize Theron's Furiosa character takes over from Max but that didn't bother me at all. I love strong female characters and Furiosa is definitely that! I cared about the clan of oddballs and their goal. Enough, anyway, to make me care about who is in the action.Talking of action. Fury Road's action sequences are every bit as amazing as you've heard. It's a total intense onslaught of revving action from start to finish. Within the first thirty minutes, we're plunged into a fiery sandstorm with a furious army of vehicles in hot pursuit. I sat there completely mesmerised by what I was watching. There's a jarring moment shortly afterwards where Max slowly awakes from a pile of sand and the slowness of the scene is so bloody jarring! Ninety minutes of Fury Road is just pure full-throttle action. It's amazingly executed with so little CGI and jaw-dropping stunt work. The final chase sequence is completely exhausting.Fury Road is eye popping. I felt like Toe Cutter before he collides into a lorry in Mad Max 1 for most of it. Let's just hope that the sequel will be like The Raid 2. It could easily get better by putting as much focus on character development and plot as well as the action. The Raid 2 did exactly that and produced one of the best films of the twenty first century. As it stands though, Fury Road is a gigantic, towering achievement. You can almost feel the testosterone sweating off the screen. The Fast and Furious franchise can well and truly sod off.

A new Mad Max movie.For the uninitiated, Max is a former lawman in post apocalyptic Australia. He lost his family. Civilisation collapsed. He lives up to the former part of his name at times when it comes to his mental state. And he wanders the outback looking for purpose.Tom Hardy takes over the lead from Mel Gibson. A brief bit of opening expostion to tells you all that I mentioed in the above paragraph. And then the film gets going.Thus you don't need to have seen any of the three previous films in order to get into this. Whether it's a sequel or a reboot isn't made clear. And frankly doesn't really matter unless you're very picky.Max is captured by warriors from a bizarre cult with an even bizarre leader, and gets taken along for the ride when one woman, Imperator Furiosa [Charlize Theron] turns on their leader and makes a break for freedom with said leader's five wives. Determined to get them to a better place, she has a desperate journey across the wastes to find it.Max ends up along for the ride. And might just get involved..Whether this will appeal to fans of the original will be a matter of opinion for them. But for anyone prepared to give it a chance, you are in for one heck of a ride. Because this is action filming as they used to it. Incredible car chase sequences with fights often going on during them. All done with stunt work. Scenes you really can't help but get caught up in and you can't take your eyes off. The visuals only add to this, since some of the cultists are bizarre in style in the extreme. It's all great imagination, superbly brought to the screen.But an action movie can't be nothing but action for all of it's running time. And this does succeed in those quieter moments, because it does great character work also. The five wives all have their moments. Characters have decent story arcs. There are plot developments and turns at the right points to keep the narrative moving. And a very memorable final scene.Charlize Theron is the stand out acting wise, really creating a woman of hidden depths with great determination. Tom Hardy is an effective Max. Although he does rather play second fiddle to Furiosa. And you might just struggle, unless you make an effort, to hear a lot of his dialogue.Same goes for some of the baddies during the action sequences. But when you've got such an eye catching, heart stopping, gripping, brilliantly imagined bit of action, who cares? It's a great ride. It's well worth five stars.The disc begins with a single advert, which can be skipped via the next button the dvd remote.It has the following language and subtitle options:Languages: English, Castilian Spanish, Hindi.Subtitles: English, Castilian Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish.The only extras are three short deleted scenes. None of them run longer than a couple of minutes. They can only be watched individually. Some have unfinished visual effects. But they're all worth a look.

Excellent