‘Furiosa’ almost has what it takes to be epic

The male inhabitants of the desiccated Australia of the Mad Max series haven’t much to do besides finding inventive ways to kill each other. Set twenty years before the events of Fury Road, Furiosa, Dementus and his Bike Horde wage guerilla-style war on the Citadel and other luckless souls who get in the way. To keep things interesting they wear outlandish costumes. This 148-minute film didn’t exhaust me like its predecessor sometimes did, although its plot deserves even less scrutiny; it has rhythm, a shape, decent performances, and above all an eye for images. Not for Furiosa the stolid gait of the usual summer would-be blockbuster.

Kidnapped by and raised as one of the Bike Horde, Furiosa is nourished by a sense of ever-replenished vengeance. Anya Taylor-Joy plays the older Furiosa; a remarkable Australian-Estonia actor named Alyla Browne plays her younger self. Watching these actors you can believe that they would bide their time. The film’s first set piece follows her mother Mary Jabassa (Charlee Fraser) as she pursues the bikers across the desert. Miller and cinematographer Simon Duggan imbue this sequence with a beautiful solemnity — they weigh each person and vehicle in this landscape — that doesn’t turn ponderous. They don’t forget that men injured or killed don’t magically disappear from the screen; Mary and later Furiosa keep stumbling on them. There is something to see in every corner of the screen.

Once the War Boys claim Furiosa for their own — she has hidden her gender like a Shakespeare character — Furiosa leaves narrative coherence to choke on dust. At 79, George Miller is a more inventive filmmaker than when he helmed the first Mad Max film more than 40 years ago. He and co-writer Nico Lathouris must’ve asked themselves every morning, “What images would make you sit up in a theater?” Immortan Joe, War Lord and Citadel chieftan, makes another appearance, or, rather, the helmet-mask thing that makes him look like Gene Simmons cosplaying as Tom Hardy’s Bane. So do his sons, the piquantly named Scrotus and Rictus. Images tug at the subconscious. A wig of Furiosa’s, its jewelry jangling, caught on a branch. A dog with a human foot in its mouth. A burrow crawling with glistening maggots. The administrator of Gas Town copying John William Waterhouse’ Hylas and the Nymphs. Battles in which a rather cosmic view of destruction have a surprising intimacy; few contemporary directors understand crowd movement as intuitively as Miller.

Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy brought stoic resolve to their roles, exactly what Fury Road required. Face often shrouded, Taylor-Joy acts with her turquoise acts, calling to mind those desert women in Paul Bowles’ fiction whose ferocity of spirit penetrates their stillness. Chris Hemsworth takes getting used to it. Bearded, long-haired, and often bare-chested he’s a natural leader of men as Dementus; he takes his job at once less and more seriously than his followers. Chained to his waist is a teddy bear he says belonged to his children, and Dementus gives the impression that the stuffed animal watches over him rather At times he sounds as if he modeled his intonations on Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker (Miller and Lathouris write infelicitous existential passages for him). But he comes through with some loopy readings, like when asked by Furiosa during the final confrontation he identifies her as “someone excessively resentful.” As Praetorian Jack, a commander and the driver of an impressive “War Rig,” Tom Burke cuts quite a different figure from his turn as the drug-addicted Tory in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir. With his face paint and slicked hair, he looks like a young Robert Palmer; when he opens his mouth he has the timbre of the young Orson Welles he played in Mank. Burke brings a romantic intensity that may even be too much for Furiosa when in the film’s most bravura sequence the Bike Horde attack the War Rig using parachutes, flammable spears, and cables.

In a handful of those battle scenes the stitches between CGI and live action are more visible than in Fury Road, but this amounts to kvetching about a movie with more poetry than many Oscar hopefuls. “The question is, do you have what it takes to make it epic?” Dementus asks. Furiosa almost does.

GRADE: A-