The Road Warrior is one of my favorite action movies of all time. The ending scene is possibly the greatest action scene ever filmed. Even though it has long periods without action, it has great fiction go along with it. I continue to be amazed that a movie so great is actually a sequel to a movie that is so terrible. Mad Max is so bad that I had to try three separate times to finish it – during my unsuccessful attempts to do so, I could only get halfway. I'm sad to say, my persistence wasn't rewarded. Mad Max doesn't get better as it goes. It's pretty bad through the end.
This movie is described as "post-apocalyptic". Somebody should have told that to the script writer, the cameramen, and the director. There is scarcely a hint of "apocalypse" in this movie, and you would never know that's what it is if you weren't told. People have morning coffee in a diner. An oil refinery is shown up and running in the background. Max wife's takes their son into a small village to buy him ice cream. The scarcity and bleakness depicted in great post-apocalyptic movies like The Road Warrior isn't shown here. False advertising abounds with this movie, since it is also usually described as a revenge tale. That description is only fitting for the last 15 minutes of the movie.
The only good action in this entire movie is the car chase at the very beginning. It is in that brilliant opening that you get a hint of the techniques that would make the next movie so good: great camera work, tons of speed, the loud sounds of engines, and a bunch of cars getting smashed. The rest isn't very entertaining, which is okay, I guess, because there isn't much of it. At the end, the main villain gets punked – not by Max, but by the director and the script writer. Max hardly engages anyone in this entire movie. In between the beginning and the end, there are no real showdowns between the good guys and the bad guys -- just the bad guys torturing people, burning people alive, and intimidating people.
The film spends for more time on boring, sappy scenes with Max and his wife than it does with anything that advances the plot -- a plot which, by the way, essentially takes an hour off. Here's a tip if you are watching this movie for the first time – skip everything between about 10 and 70 minutes. It's nothing but 60 minutes of poorly acted, poorly-paced drama that sets up an anticlimactic revenge in the end that falls flat. Here's a better tip – skip the movie altogether. If you don't, you might end up like Max – filled with vengeful bloodlust – at the person who recommended this stinking turd to you.
This movie is described as "post-apocalyptic". Somebody should have told that to the script writer, the cameramen, and the director. There is scarcely a hint of "apocalypse" in this movie, and you would never know that's what it is if you weren't told. People have morning coffee in a diner. An oil refinery is shown up and running in the background. Max wife's takes their son into a small village to buy him ice cream. The scarcity and bleakness depicted in great post-apocalyptic movies like The Road Warrior isn't shown here. False advertising abounds with this movie, since it is also usually described as a revenge tale. That description is only fitting for the last 15 minutes of the movie.
The only good action in this entire movie is the car chase at the very beginning. It is in that brilliant opening that you get a hint of the techniques that would make the next movie so good: great camera work, tons of speed, the loud sounds of engines, and a bunch of cars getting smashed. The rest isn't very entertaining, which is okay, I guess, because there isn't much of it. At the end, the main villain gets punked – not by Max, but by the director and the script writer. Max hardly engages anyone in this entire movie. In between the beginning and the end, there are no real showdowns between the good guys and the bad guys -- just the bad guys torturing people, burning people alive, and intimidating people.
The film spends for more time on boring, sappy scenes with Max and his wife than it does with anything that advances the plot -- a plot which, by the way, essentially takes an hour off. Here's a tip if you are watching this movie for the first time – skip everything between about 10 and 70 minutes. It's nothing but 60 minutes of poorly acted, poorly-paced drama that sets up an anticlimactic revenge in the end that falls flat. Here's a better tip – skip the movie altogether. If you don't, you might end up like Max – filled with vengeful bloodlust – at the person who recommended this stinking turd to you.