Welcome back to another edition of Adam's Reviews!! **queue intro music**
Tonight's movie flick is the dystopian sequel, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) which brings back filmmaker George Miller and the main star, the masterful Mel Gibson who returns as Max Rockatansky, a former police officer who now assumes the mantle of a lone wolf about to be turned into a reluctant hero. We get a brief recap of the events from the first film and how Australia became a wasteland then see a chase scene. This movie hits it straight off with the chase scene and from then it is a high powered, high octane action with barely time for a breath, or a pause, or a foot off the accelerator.
In this film Max is a shell of a man, or as the character Pappagallo puts it "you're a scavenger, Max, you're a maggot, did you know that? You're living off the corpse of the old world." Max is still wearing his beat-up shoulder padded police jacket and has a contraption on one leg to help him walk which reflects the final 10 minutes of the first movie. Max cruises through the desolate landscape of a dystopian future in his V8 Interceptor with his stalwart companion dog known as Dog and Max's chief aim in life is to keep his car fuelled up with and to survive even if it means eating canned dog food.
The post-apocalyptic setting for the continuation of Max's story in which he unwillingly decides to abandon his loner ways in order to be the saviour of a group of people trying to protect their oil refinery outpost who are led by idealistic naivete by the name of Papagallo Their aim is to maintain and protect their oil which in this film is the main currency and commodity and is in danger by a bike-riding, leather-wearing, mohawk-sporting gang led by a muscular, hockey-mask wearing man who calls himself Lord Humungus along with his supercharged hot rod clan, including his main henchman Wez who sports a red mohawk and has a presumable personal male slave on a chain.
The energy of this flick is a western at heart where a group of settlers are forced to fend for themselves against a gang of punk rock marauders, where we see our road warrior enter into the scene as a hardened man who reluctantly decides to interfere to help the group in a cruel, cold, unfeeling world. While the leather clad marauders are hell bent on destruction.
The raw stunt work in this flick is awesome and remember back in this era there is no CGI, its just pain stunt work that gives us a riot of extravagant, climactic, fast-paced car chase scenes. This can be illustrated with the highway chase scene were Max attempts to break out with a tanker truck of priceless gasoline, pursued and defended by various types vehicles from both groups. The choreography in this flick where we see stunt men and women and actors flung across bonnets, into head-on collisions and under the wheels of different types of vehicles in the 12-to-13-minute chase scene is amazing and in my opinion is one of the best action sequences in the history of cinema.
Barely uttering more than a few lines throughout the entirety of the film, Mel Gibson grit and western stye like lone wolf captures the audience as a simple man who is merely trying to survive therefore is a man of action and forward movement, not one of verbal conceptualization. His character like to bargain a deal and shows signs of emotion in particular to a feral kid who is handy with a boomerang.
Another important character is Dog, who in my opinion is the last link to Max's remaining humanity Dog is meticulous and expressive that it's hard to believe there isn't an actual performance happening here. When he lounges in the sun with Max, belly up, tongue out, you see genuine happiness. When he outwits Max's enemies, you can see the wheels turning inside his mind, the perfect engine of cleverness. Like his human keeper, Dog has seen some crazy shiz, and every one of those experiences has formed his personality and character. The little guy does it all including biting on a bone that is attached to a string which is attached to a trigger of a shotgun.
Bruce Spence's The Gyro Captain, an eccentric mechanic who offers some of the film's more humorous moments whether it be talking about playing Mahjong with the snakes, waking up with Dog to the noise (and I guess to the smell) of Max opening up a can of Dinky-Di dog food and retrieving a wooden spoon from his jacket to his goof moments with Max including the binocular and monocular scene.
At heart, this is still a pretty dark movie, with a large body count, brutal violence, like we see characters who you root for being killed off in scenes that you wouldn't dare think. To me this flick is a very rare sequel that actually manages to be better than the original film and to me is a timeless classic, a true thrilling masterpiece and worth the fuel to watch over and over again. Overall 10/10.
Tonight's movie flick is the dystopian sequel, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) which brings back filmmaker George Miller and the main star, the masterful Mel Gibson who returns as Max Rockatansky, a former police officer who now assumes the mantle of a lone wolf about to be turned into a reluctant hero. We get a brief recap of the events from the first film and how Australia became a wasteland then see a chase scene. This movie hits it straight off with the chase scene and from then it is a high powered, high octane action with barely time for a breath, or a pause, or a foot off the accelerator.
In this film Max is a shell of a man, or as the character Pappagallo puts it "you're a scavenger, Max, you're a maggot, did you know that? You're living off the corpse of the old world." Max is still wearing his beat-up shoulder padded police jacket and has a contraption on one leg to help him walk which reflects the final 10 minutes of the first movie. Max cruises through the desolate landscape of a dystopian future in his V8 Interceptor with his stalwart companion dog known as Dog and Max's chief aim in life is to keep his car fuelled up with and to survive even if it means eating canned dog food.
The post-apocalyptic setting for the continuation of Max's story in which he unwillingly decides to abandon his loner ways in order to be the saviour of a group of people trying to protect their oil refinery outpost who are led by idealistic naivete by the name of Papagallo Their aim is to maintain and protect their oil which in this film is the main currency and commodity and is in danger by a bike-riding, leather-wearing, mohawk-sporting gang led by a muscular, hockey-mask wearing man who calls himself Lord Humungus along with his supercharged hot rod clan, including his main henchman Wez who sports a red mohawk and has a presumable personal male slave on a chain.
The energy of this flick is a western at heart where a group of settlers are forced to fend for themselves against a gang of punk rock marauders, where we see our road warrior enter into the scene as a hardened man who reluctantly decides to interfere to help the group in a cruel, cold, unfeeling world. While the leather clad marauders are hell bent on destruction.
The raw stunt work in this flick is awesome and remember back in this era there is no CGI, its just pain stunt work that gives us a riot of extravagant, climactic, fast-paced car chase scenes. This can be illustrated with the highway chase scene were Max attempts to break out with a tanker truck of priceless gasoline, pursued and defended by various types vehicles from both groups. The choreography in this flick where we see stunt men and women and actors flung across bonnets, into head-on collisions and under the wheels of different types of vehicles in the 12-to-13-minute chase scene is amazing and in my opinion is one of the best action sequences in the history of cinema.
Barely uttering more than a few lines throughout the entirety of the film, Mel Gibson grit and western stye like lone wolf captures the audience as a simple man who is merely trying to survive therefore is a man of action and forward movement, not one of verbal conceptualization. His character like to bargain a deal and shows signs of emotion in particular to a feral kid who is handy with a boomerang.
Another important character is Dog, who in my opinion is the last link to Max's remaining humanity Dog is meticulous and expressive that it's hard to believe there isn't an actual performance happening here. When he lounges in the sun with Max, belly up, tongue out, you see genuine happiness. When he outwits Max's enemies, you can see the wheels turning inside his mind, the perfect engine of cleverness. Like his human keeper, Dog has seen some crazy shiz, and every one of those experiences has formed his personality and character. The little guy does it all including biting on a bone that is attached to a string which is attached to a trigger of a shotgun.
Bruce Spence's The Gyro Captain, an eccentric mechanic who offers some of the film's more humorous moments whether it be talking about playing Mahjong with the snakes, waking up with Dog to the noise (and I guess to the smell) of Max opening up a can of Dinky-Di dog food and retrieving a wooden spoon from his jacket to his goof moments with Max including the binocular and monocular scene.
At heart, this is still a pretty dark movie, with a large body count, brutal violence, like we see characters who you root for being killed off in scenes that you wouldn't dare think. To me this flick is a very rare sequel that actually manages to be better than the original film and to me is a timeless classic, a true thrilling masterpiece and worth the fuel to watch over and over again. Overall 10/10.