There is a moment in George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” when a dog with a prosthetic leg lumbers onto the screen. At first, the sight is pitiable—who hurt this poor creature?—but that’s before you spy what Miller’s roving fur baby has in its mouth: a human limb.
Twisting our sympathies from “aw!” to “agh!,” the scene mirrors the whiplash that I experienced during the entire movie. As a ravenous Miller acolyte, I wanted to love “Furiosa,” but I spent my first viewing of the film simultaneously despairing at its lackadaisical pacing and defiantly clinging to its lovably mordant details.
Being a prequel to Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), “Furiosa” was destined to disappoint—though any meal is disappointing after a slice of homemade chocolate pecan pie. To this day, a mere mouthful of “Fury Road” sends me into a state of spiritual ecstasy, blissing out to the glorious post-apocalyptic war that Max (Tom Hardy) and Furiosa (Charlize Theron) wage against the vicious, bloated patriarch Immortan Joe (the late Hugh Keays-Byrne). What’s a director to do after transporting us to moviegoing heaven? Reach for the sun and get burned, I guess.
Like Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing” (2022), “Furiosa” is a story about stories. In “Longing,” Tilda Swinton played a Joseph Campbell-esque scholar of myth hailed as a “narratologist” (what a word!). A fine narratologist in his own right, Miller laces “Furiosa” with allusions to the Book of Genesis, beginning with an Edenic realm where a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) plucks a menacingly ripe peach.
A brutal education in the cruelty of men follows: Furiosa is captured by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a bouncy sadist who leads a “biker horde.” Strapping Furiosa’s mother, Mary Jo Bassa (Charlee Fraser), to a cross and torturing her to death, Dementus makes plain Miller’s meaning: In this future, Christ is a woman and Furiosa will wreak righteous havoc in her name.
Furiosa becomes a pawn in Dementus’ rivalry with Immortan Joe (now played by Lachy Hulme), who controls his fanatical War Boys by hoarding water, guns, and gasoline. Though Furiosa’s hunger for vengeance is greater than either tyrant’s ego, she finds herself walking the path to retribution for over a decade, allowing Browne to age into Anya Taylor-Joy, who eventually adopts Theron’s striking look from “Fury Road” (sleek buzzcut, dark war paint, robotic arm).
The stretched-out timeline does Miller’s movie no favors. Set over three days, “Fury Road” was triumphantly compact, whereas “Furiosa” drags on so long that Browne and Taylor-Joy each play Furiosa for roughly half the film, preventing either from fully commanding the screen as Theron did nine years ago.
It doesn’t help that weariness plagues the movie’s 148-minute running time. Scenes that should have been brief and fierce—like Furiosa and Dementus’ verbose showdown—grow flabby and tedious, dragged down by Junkie XL’s disappointingly restrained score (which relies too heavily on recycled “Fury Road” cues).
By the time Miller unfurls a reel of “Fury Road” highlights—including a shot of a bobbing metallic bird’s head that he allegedly spent hours filming—it feels like a tacit admission that “Furiosa” is wobbly enough to require a “remember the good times?” jolt. Though Furiosa spends much of the film outrunning Dementus’ minions, none of the chases are as suspenseful as Miller’s pursuit of his own genius.
At times, he catches up, most notably when Furiosa dirties her face and disguises herself as a boy to avoid becoming one of Immortan Joe’s sex slaves. Miller is a master of gleeful mayhem—like the Bullet Farmer in “Fury Road,” he’s a “conductor of a choir of death”—but he also has an anthropologist’s precision when chronicling the myriad ways his characters resist becoming commodities in the dusty wasteland where all of the “Mad Max” films unfold.
Most of this world’s denizens are men who are as stupid as they are evil. A rare exception is Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke, who played Orson Welles in David Fincher’s “Mank”), a quietly rebellious servant of the Immortan who becomes Furiosa’s ally when hang-gliding goons assault his supply convoy (the only action scene in the film that comes within the vicinity of the baroque flair of “Fury Road”).
Whether he’s glowering handsomely behind a steering wheel or gazing soulfully at Furiosa, Jack embodies the promise that Miller has valiantly clung to throughout the “Mad Max” franchise’s 45-year history: Even if the world falls, decency will endure. There will be Immortans and Dementuses, but there will also be Furiosas and Jacks, holding true to the dream of being “a soldier for a virtuous cause.”
That dream flowers in “Furiosa.” In the spirit of narratology, Miller pays homage to the Trojan Horse and “Twelfth Night” (there are also, whether by serendipity or design, echoes of modern cinematic myths, including Wu Tiangming’s “The King of Masks” and Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain”). Yet the biblical references reverberate the most clearly, since faith animates both Miller and his characters.
“Furiosa” always comes back to faith—secular faith, but faith nonetheless. There’s Furiosa’s faith that she will avenge her mother; Jack’s faith that his destiny is to stand with Furiosa; and Miller’s faith in the power of films to thrill, move, and rouse. He’s a believer, and the road he rockets along leads only to one destination: revolution.
