Film Review: Furiosa is a solid Mad Max supercut, but lacks vitality

"Written by George Miller and Nick Lathouris, Furiosa plays like a supercut of all the other ‘Mad Max’ movies, strong on vividly shot action set-pieces and a grotesque vision of humanity gone feral"

Chris Hemsworth stars as Dementus in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
• ★★★☆☆
• Cinema release

‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust,’ wrote TS Eliot in ‘The Wasteland’, so we can only imagine what he might have achieved with the barren wasteland that is home to ‘gangs swarming like locusts’ as Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (15A) begins.

A prequel to Fury Road (2015), the movie opens with the young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) living in an Edenic oasis in the midst of the vast post-apocalyptic desert; when Furiosa stumbles upon raiders infiltrating her people’s paradise, she is kidnapped and hauled off to the ramshackle court of Dr Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a shaggy-bearded barbarian who is determined to topple the resource-hungry tyrants who inhabit the Citadel.

Identified as a future consort for Dementus, and consigned to the living death of his harem, Furiosa begins to plot her escape.

Written by George Miller and Nick Lathouris (who played Grease Rat in the original Mad Max), with Miller directing, Furiosa plays like a supercut of all the other ‘Mad Max’ movies, strong on vividly shot action set-pieces and a grotesque vision of humanity gone feral, although this outing is rather episodic until the older Furiosa — now played by Anya Taylor-Joy — enters the picture, fuelled by hatred for Dementus and determined, as ‘the darkest of angels’, to wreak a savage revenge.

Taylor-Joy is terrific, a chillingly plausible forerunner of the force of nature that was Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in Fury Road, although Hemsworth’s turn as Dementus isn’t quite so convincing as he stomps around in a role that seems to be half-ringmaster, half-clown.

Solid rather than spectacular, and deeply dispiriting in the way its gangs burn off huge amounts of fuel as they battle for scarce resources, Furiosa lacks the dark vitality of its predecessors.