5 out of 5

Director: George Miller

Sure, it’s a little rough around the edges and there isn’t a vigilante hero cliche it doesn’t touch, but it’s thirty years on and the action and concept STILL hold up – the car chase are STILL unbelievably intense and Humungus is STILL pretty creepy cool – so in the same way that we can forgive Mad Max its missteps because it eventually hits and sticks to that solid line of campy cool, so can we allow for Road Warrior’s surface plotting and focus on how well it executes all of its pieces with minimal clutters… plus, the argument could be made that the flick was partially responsible for creating the template for those mentioned cliches…  I think one of the coolest aspects of this flick is how it undeniably connects to the first one but has no need to reference it directly.  You can watch this as a separate entity and buy it, or you can get an extra ‘wow’ factor from seeing how much has changed in the world between film one and two.  Max is full-on rogue, driving about the near-future wasteland and running afoul of the lords of the highways – biker gangs – to salvage the world’s finest commodity of gasoline.  He stumbles across a loopy guy who mentions to him a protected holding that’s sitting on tons of fuel, and when Max tries to negotiate for some of it, he finds himself mixed up in a war with a biker gang also after the resource.  George Miller’s script spares us dialogue and character clutter for the best: Max’s reluctant turn into assisting the dwellers of the holding in escaping with their fuel works because it’s not over-narrated, and Mel has turned off some of his nice guy charm from film one to give us a more terse Max who lets loose with a panicked glare at just the right moments to keep him human.  But the bread and butter here are the car chases.  I’m not a simple sucker for action flicks, nor would I promote extended sequences like those used here for any given film, but using his bigger budget to smooth out some of the roughness of Mad Max’s chases (though that roughness did, admittedly, have its own appeal) as well as adding the ability to have more and bigger cars, George Miller gets his camera right up in the business, gives us reasons for people to be zipping to and fro, and makes every minute thrilling; those scenes integral to the movie and not just blow-em-up filler.  Satisfyingly, ‘Road Warrior’ ends by leaving our rogue a rogue, a classic (essentially) no-namer walking into the sunset, while the world continues devolving around him.  A pretty perfect example of the genre executed without any of the excess modern takes on the style add to the mix.

Update 02.05.2017: Blu-ray notes – a great transfer, but surprisingly, the commentary from George Miller and Cinematographer Dean Semler is pretty sparse.  It’s not without content, but Miller has a very muted, pause-laden way of speaking that leaves a lot of empty space, and it’s not littered with the kind of details that made the commentary on Mad Max pretty exciting.