Sam Kriss

The new Mad Max film is a betrayal of everything that made Fury Road so good

Action films need to lay off the CGI

Anya Taylor-Joy is perfectly fine as vengeful heroine Furiosa. © 2024 Warner Bros. Feature Productions Pty Limited and Domain Pictures, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Photo: Jasin Boland  
issue 25 May 2024

Action films are boring. This isn’t really an opinion, it’s just demonstrably true. Try it for yourself: put on any high-octane, orange-and-teal action movie from the last 15 years and see how long it takes before you start automatically fiddling around with your phone. I can usually make it about five minutes. This is weird. I can deal with all the incredibly sedate cinematic vegetables just fine, but as soon as there are gunfights or chases involved I get distracted. I think I know why.

The real betrayal of this Mad Max sequel is that it’s full of talking

Action directors know that they’re competing with the sensory equivalent of a crackpipe in every pocket, so they do whatever they can to make their films as attention-grabbing as possible. Everything comes out slick, shiny, computerised; a lot of the time, each individual shot only lasts for a few seconds, in case you get tired of looking at one thing for too long.

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