Thursday, December 30, 2010

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)




Director: George Miller

Starring: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Michael Preston, Max Phipps, Vernon Wells

More info: IMDb

Tagline: In the future, cities will become deserts, roads will become battlefields and the hope of mankind will appear as a stranger.

Plot: A former police officer is now a lone wanderer, traveling through a devastated Australia after a nuclear war looking for now-priceless petrol. He lives to survive and is none too pleased when he finds himself the only hope of a small group of honest people running a remote oil refinery. He must protect them from the bike gang that is terrorizing them whilst transporting their entire fuel supply to safety.



My rating: 9/10

Will I watch it again? Guaranteed!


For as fun as MAD MAX (1979) was, THE ROAD WARRIOR is even better. It was only a few years ago that I watched this all the way through for the first time. I recall I had a bad feeling about it when they introduced the dog. Oh, great, I thought, they're going to do the same typical bullshit with the dog that they do in every other movie. Nope. They didn't and I liked what they did with it. Then the same thing happened when they introduced the feral kid and they totally surprised me with how well they treated that character. NICE! That's just indicative of the whole picture, really. George Miller & co. took cliches and did the unexpected with them.





The story is all too simple but it's how it's treated that makes it stand taller than most action movies from the past forty years. The stunts are bigger than the last movie and the whole thing wraps up nicely. The desolated Australian landscape is put to great use and you really get the look and feel for a post apocalyptic world without them spending an awful lot of money. It's a stellar ride and a whole lot of fun.

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