![]() (It’s buy into the mythopoeia or bust.) This fervent youth (Nicholas Hoult) seeks a berth in Valhalla, which can be won through valiant service to the city’s boil-infested overlord, who lives off freshly pumped mother’s milk and keeps a leprous populace thirstily at bay by controlling the sluice gates. Max is soon dangling upside-down in a swarming desert citadel, his face caged and his veins transfusing blood into a so-called ‘half-life war boy’. Ever imagined a hedgehoggy hatchback shagging a nitro-boosted 200hp HGV? Here’s what two hours of it looks (and sounds) like. Meet a souped-up forecourt-full of customised roadsters that roar across the screen like a scenario in a petrolhead’s lurid engine-porn fantasy. The opening car chase is an overture of juddering intensity which introduces the car pool. ![]() We meet Max snacking on a twin-headed lizard in this mutant wilderness, where he is rapidly outflanked by a touring party of bald-pated, bare-chested, white-daubed gym bunnies. In come the scorched umber sands, slithery dunes and craggy canyons of the Namib desert. Out goes the outback, which maybe didn’t look parched enough to embody the dry-roasted future. And does stunts: in one eye-popping sequence Hardy is precariously strapped like a prow to a rattling truck. In short, new face, same old mopey loner who grunts and shunts. He says even less here beyond introducing himself as ‘the one who runs from both the living and the dead’. You’ve seen Hardy in all sorts, though probably not heard him say much. Instead, performing essential repairs to the chassis while thumping along at 60, is Tom Hardy, our very own amalgam of rubber, teak and gristle. One casualty of the gestation is Gibson, currently impounded in the where-are-they-now file. It’s taken so long that its central notion - a future without ready access to water - barely qualifies as sci-fi. This fourth instalment has been on director George Miller’s to-do list since the Nineties. Does it pull this off? Does his Holiness ride a popemobile? All these years on, Mad Max: Fury Road has a narrow strip of tarmac to navigate: it must keep faith with the trilogy’s pre-digital va-va-voom, while serving up enough throaty thrills to raise a tingle on the desensitised dermis of today’s lard-bucket gamer. Mel Gibson first fired up his turbo-jalopy back in 1979 (two sequels followed with ever bigger engines and hair extensions). It puts the new Mad Max in a strange relationship with its hoary forebears. In our cyber-enabled times, kid designers can mega-pixelate any old apocalypse on to the screen of your local Imax. No one goes slack-jawed in wonder at the movies any more.
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