Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Following on from the petrol fumes of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa (as originally played by Charlize Theron) finally gets her origin story in 2024’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

Now, if you’ve seen Mad Max: Fury Road you’re probably aware of the on-set tensions between the previous film’s two stars, Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. With the benefit of time, it seems that much of this stemmed from a lack of backstory for their characters. Yet, during an enforced shut-down, writer / director George Miller took care of this. In fact, he did it so well that he pretty much had the prequel script completed by the tail-end of the Fury Road shoot.

However, there was a problem – time. Whilst Martin Scorsese was ready to turn the talents of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci over to Hollywood’s de-ageing wizards, Miller wasn’t. In his eyes, it just didn’t work so he looked to recast Furiosa with a younger actress. Enter Anja Taylor-Joy.

Thinner and with bigger eyes, her Furiosa gets barely thirty lines of dialogue to flesh out the fan’s fascination for the take-no-shit woman that Theron so admirably carved from an empty script. Does it work? Yes and no and that all comes down to what you expect.

You see, prior to Fury Road, the Mad Max series has always been something of a moving cavalcade of cinematic tastes. Mad Max relied on Mel Gibson’s good looks and pre-CGI stunts, Mad Max 2 was a gritty, survivalist escape movie and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome surrendered itself to kid-friendly values with Max becoming a loci-in-parentis to some wilderness kids. So, by Thunderdome, the Max character had really run its course. Sure, they bolted him onto Fury Road but he was only the chaser to the main cocktail of Theron saving a harem of surrogate wives from a despotic warlord.

So, what were we missing from her back story in Fury Road? Honestly, not much. In Furisoa, she gets kidnapped, has her life destroyed and seeks vengeance on a regal nose that Chris Hemsworth has borrowed from The Hours’ Nicole Kidman – and the nose is good. If anything it allows him to disappear from his omnipresent Thor persona into something much darker akin to his turn in 2018’s Bad Times at El Royale. Unfortunately, though, there’s no such foliage for Anya Taylor Joy to duck behind. Onscreen for the entirety of Furiosa, a dead-eyed stare and pouty lips can only take you so far until it’s head-shaving time – and then – the movie weirdly seems to stamp on the fast-forward button when it comes to story-telling.

Sure, the reheated, uni-directional chase sequence from Mad Max 2 is back and there is all manner of new waste-land variations and physics-defying eye-candies to enjoy. The lame trailer CGI special effects aren’t as awful as the teasers suggested and after a while, you just succumb to the obvious sound-staged scenes when they arrive – but there is one, inescapable bullet here that can’t be dodged. This is the first time in the series George Miller has repeated himself.

To all intents and purposes, Furiosa is Fury Road 0.5 with the addition of Chris Hemsworth and not much else. Tom Holkenborg’s music is as awesome as before and seen on the largest screen possible, Furiosa makes for an appealing case to leave the couch and venture forth unto the multiplex. However, there is one extra, fatal flaw. Just at its end, it presents a re-cut summary of Fury Road – with Charlize Theron – being magnificent. And in those brief few minutes, the illusion is shattered.

In short, we need Charlize Theron back, being older, more embittered, kicking more ass and taking fewer prisoners. If anything, this Furiosa is the amuse-bouche you inhale before you kick the franchise’s dusty tyres and demand the grand dessert.