Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ★★★★

THE latest and fifth entry in the Mad Max franchise, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, gives audiences one hell of a ride.

Like its immediate predecessor, 2015’s Fury Road, it revels in incredible, fast-paced action set within a strangely realistic dystopian wasteland.

This bleak future is populated by weird and dangerous people driving, riding, crashing and jumping on and off an even weirder and more dangerous array of speeding vehicles.

Furiosa isn’t as ground-breaking as Fury Road in terms of the extent of the practical stunt work which has made that film so revered amongst action cinema fans.

But, while there appears to be a little more reliance on computer generated effects, the integration of the effects is mostly seamless and still showcases the propulsive nature of George Miller’s film-making.

The quality of the story is marginally an improvement on Fury Road which was very much an opportunity for Miller to re-set the franchise that amazingly hadn’t been revisited for two decades.

Furiosa gives us the back story of Fury Road’s main female character, starting as a girl and ending around the time that Fury Road begins. Anya Taylor-Joy is excellent in a role in which she mostly has to present the gamut of emotions in purely physical ways.

All the cast thoroughly enjoy themselves, most of all Chris Hemsworth who gives one of his best performances as the ferocious but strangely child-like leader of a marauding pack of scavenging bikies who cause Furiosa to be out for vengeance and start a war between the rulers of the wasteland’s three main communities.

The other improvement on the last film is the stunning cinematography by Kiwi Simon Duggan which adds incredible atmosphere while bringing Miller’s visions and ideas to life.

Make sure you see it on the biggest screen that you can with the best sound because the roar of those machines amidst Tom Holkenborg’s score is at times breath-taking.

It may not be quite as good as Fury Road, but Furiosa comes pretty close.