“Furiosa” Commands the Screen

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024) 4 out of 5 stars 

You’d be forgiven if, upon hearing that a film runs 148 minutes, you emit a low growl of apprehension. Fortunately, director George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga—a prequel to his 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road—only begins to lose some kind of steam (and then only a little) in its final half hour. That means there are 120 searing minutes of high-octane action coupled with mostly fascinating character development. Miller once again proves himself the king of the cinematic apocalypse.

As befits an origin story, we meet our protagonist when she is but a child, played at first, with magnificent intensity, by Alyla Browne (Sting). The world has been through multiple calamities brought on by our species but young Furiosa and her kind live in a green and fertile paradise on the edge of a vast desert. When a group of ravaging intruders shows up, Furiosa takes action, only to find herself kidnapped, her mother in hot pursuit.

What ensues is just one of a series of impressive set pieces. Nay, impressive doesn’t come close to describing the pure adrenaline rush that Miller delivers, time and again. Here, Furiosa’s enraged mom (Charlee Fraser, Anyone But You) picks off the marauders one by one, though just enough survive to make it to their own stronghold, thereby threatening to reveal the location whence they stole the girl. Bad things happen to good and bad people alike, and the final result is that Furiosa ends up in the clutches of the desert folk.

Their leader is a violent agent of chaos who goes by the name Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth (Thor: Love and Thunder) in what may just be the best performance of his career (prosthetic nose and all). Filled with an unquenchable lust for power that is only matched by his sadism, Dementus leads a not-so-merry bunch of equally crazed followers in search of others to conquer and resources to plunder. Furiosa is just one more prize in his pocket, placed in a cage next to a tattooed elder known as “The History Man” (George Shevtsov, Three Thousand Years of Longing), whose asides occasionally veer into voiceover narration and the kind of mythologizing that is a hallmark of this long-running saga.

Dementus’ ambition leads him to the Citadel, that rocky outpost that formed the center of the drama in Fury Road. There, he makes the mistake of challenging Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, also Three Thousand Years of Longing)—the villain of the previous film—only to discover that sometimes organization counts for more than brutality (which Immortan Joe also has in spades). Which leaves Dementus in need of an alternate plan, which he soon puts into motion.

And so the stage is set for an ongoing battle between forces of varying degrees of savagery, the backdrop for Furiosa’s coming of age. It’s not long before she ends up on Immortan Joe’s side, but the threats to her well-being do not end with that leap. He may, within the context of this film, be the lesser of two evils, but children (particularly girls) are safe nowhere. Which means it’s time to toughen up (though she was already resilient and resourceful), a process we witness through more of Miller’s outstanding action sequences. At some point, we know she will lose an arm—given her appearance in Fury Road—but getting there is part of the fun (in a perverse way). There’s even a brief Easter egg of a shot featuring the otherwise absent (but still titular) Max.

Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma.) picks up from Browne in the third (of five) section of the movie. And though she looks nothing like Charlize Theron, who played Furiosa last time, she nevertheless holds her own, especially in the final scene where she goes toe to toe with Hemsworth. For much of her early onscreen appearance, she barely speaks, relying on muscular behavioral acting to convey emotion (or lack thereof). We first get a real glimpse of her action-star bona fides in an extended truck chase, Tom Burke (The Wonder) at the wheel as Praetorian Jack, the man who will soon become her mentor. Bullets fly, bodies somersault, and blood flows in copious quantities. It’s a glorious thing.

If the last half hour falters a bit, overly relying on voiceover and then excessive exposition, the movie as a whole remains immensely satisfying. There’s a visceral quality to the stunts, even if the internet has been full of people attacking its use of CGI (Fury Road used practical effects, instead). Digital or in-camera, the blood and guts splatter with real weight. Pair that with meaningful meditations on the human race’s propensity for war, and Furiosa packs a heavy punch. You’ll feel the impact long after the credits roll.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.