Review: 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Story' is a masterpiece of rage, fire and octane, with Anya Taylor-Joy delivering a ferocious performance

In an era where creatures, machines and worlds can be pieced together with pixels, the tactile messiness of George Miller’s “Mad Max” movies — where the stunt driving and other outlandish tricks are, for the most part, happening in camera — is astonishing. 

In Miller’s new rendition, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Miller takes a fascinating detour from the chronicles of Max, the one-time cop now driving across the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic hellscape — to focus on the most interesting character Miller has created: The hardened driver and freedom fighter, Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Furiosa’s story is told in chapters, the first showing her (played by Alyla Browne) as a young girl riding with her mother (Charlie Fraser), a sharpshooter racing to keep marauders from telling the warlord Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) the location of their “a place of abundance.” Ultimately, Furiosa is kidnapped by Dementus, beginning an odyssey where she has to be smart to see the next sunrise.

For awhile, we watch Furiosa as she’s traded around the wastelands, either with the blowhard Dementus and his scruffy biker minions or in The Citadel, led by the masked Immortal Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his boorish and dim sons, Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and Scrotus (Josh Herman). Dementus controls Gastown, trading fuel for the food Joe’s laborers produce in The Citadel.

It’s nearly an hour before Miller shows us Furiosa as an adult — played by the movie’s star, Anya Taylor-Joy — and by then, she’s a hardened survivor, disguising herself as a young man so she can stay topside and spot opportunities to escape. Such a moment arrives, when Joe’s top driver, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), is assigned to drive a big rig with supplies on the ambush-prone road to Gastown, in what is the movie’s signature stunt sequence. 

The script, by Miller and Nico Lathouris, doesn’t move as swiftly as the one they wrote for “Fury Road,” but that’s a matter of function. This is an origin story, and must be told in fragments — a mosaic rather than an oil painting, where the pieces come together to create the striking portrait of a woman becoming a warrior in front of our eyes.

Taylor-Joy’s performance is breathtaking, bringing out Furiosa’s years of trauma and rage — and all the more impressive because she has sparse dialogue, and much of her emotion is conveyed in economical movement and those expressive eyes. The fact that Taylor-Joy doesn’t let Hemsworth, who’s quite good in the flashier and talkier villain role, steal the movie out from under her is a testament to her fierce talent.

In a George Miller movie, though, the other star is the world he has built — and, once again, the way Miller and his crew construct the movie’s chrome-plated road monsters, made to look cobbled together from spare parts but actually painstaking in every detail, nearly overloads the viewer’s eyes and brain. Between Miller’s world-building and Taylor-Joy’s ferocious performance, “Furiosa” delivers tons of entertainment and still makes the audience want to know what happens next.

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‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 24, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for sequences of strong violence, and grisly images. Running time: 148 minutes.