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Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) plays a younger version of the character Charlize Theron played in 2015’s brilliant Mad Max: Fury Road in this prequel co-written and directed by series creator George Miller. We learn Furiosa’s backstory — how she was kidnapped by a warlord named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), escaped the sexual slavery of Fury Road‘s Immortan Joe, nearly fell in love with a convoy driver (Tom Burke), and became an all-around, one-armed bad ass with the hopes of one day returning to the green valley where she was born.
My main problem with Furiosa is that we just don’t need this movie. Like, at all. When you compare it to Fury Road, it falls short in every conceivable way. It’s far less exciting, with only one or two memorable action scenes. Fury Road, by contrast, is pretty much one sustained action sequence. What’s worse is that all the remarkable live-action stunt-work in Fury Road is largely replaced in Furiosa by a ton of undercooked and phony-looking computer-generated imagery, making Furiosa look and feel like nothing but a hastily-made, cheap Fury Road knock-off.
Furiosa is too long. At two and a half hours, it meanders and wobbles along, struggling to gain momentum and give the audience a clear idea where it’s headed or what it’s about. Taylor-Joy doesn’t even appear until an hour into the movie. Before then the movie’s about trade deals among greedy warlords. (I had dreadful flashbacks of George Lucas’ misconceived Star Wars prequels, with all their trade discussions and senate hearings.) Once Taylor-Joy takes center stage, her love story with Tom Burke’s character threatens to become interesting — but it goes nowhere. Instead, the last half of the movie is just about getting revenge on Chris Hemsworth, who’s doing a poor impersonation of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow throughout the movie. The final confrontation between Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth has some meat to it, but the film runs out of steam well before we get there.
Furiosa may arguably be a character strong enough to warrant her own prequel, but it needs to be more character-driven than this. Taylor-Joy is not nearly as convincing in the role as Theron was. Theron’s take felt grounded and real. Taylor-Joy’s take is more comic-book and stylized, less engrossing and relatable. In a strange way, Furiosa feels like a secondary character in her own movie, just like Tom Hardy’s Max was treated in Fury Road (where Furiosa was very much the main character). George Miller should have left well enough alone. He truly hit the top with Fury Road. Furiosa is only a footnote to that earlier masterpiece.
With Ayla Browne as young Furiosa, Lachy Hulme taking over the role of Immortan Joe from the late Hugh Keays-Byrne, Josh Helman as Scrotus, Nathan Jones as Rictus Erectus, and David Collins as Smeg. Gotta love some of these names.