Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review — Anya Taylor-Joy makes a ferocious badass heroine

George Miller startled and thrilled viewers when he revved up the dormant engine of the Mad Max saga with 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road, an action movie so exhilarating it made the Fast & Furious franchise resemble a spin in a Reliant Robin. Thirty years after Mel Gibson's final turn as the iconic road warrior in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, who then knew there was so much juice left in the tank? Just as startling, however, was the discovery that it wasn't Tom Hardy’s rugged Max but Charlize Theron's even more tenacious survivor, one-armed rebel Furiosa, who drove the plot and dominated the film. 

Nine years on from Fury Road and now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa gets her own film with a prequel that reveals her origins and explains what spurred her to make that dash for freedom with a savage warlord's five enslaved wives. With a story that spans 15 years rather than Fury Road’s three days and two nights, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga doesn’t have its predecessor's propulsive momentum, but the change of gear gives Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris more opportunity to explore the vividly dystopian, post-apocalyptic world of the Mad Max films.

So we now get a deeper view of Fury Road’s barren Wasteland and its three forbidding fortresses — neo-medieval hellscapes that wouldn't look out of place in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch — and we get to see where it was that Furiosa was heading when she made her escape bid from the citadel of warlord Immortan Joe in the earlier film. Furiosa's destination was her childhood home, an idyllic, matriarchal Eden known as the Green Place of Many Mothers, and at the start of the new movie we see her snatched from it at the age of 10 by marauding bikers. She ends up a captive of yet another savage warlord, Dementus, the leader of a great biker horde, played by a prosthetics-sporting Chris Hemsworth as a roaring, charismatically cruel and mad tyrant.

Even at 10, the young Furiosa (a wide-eyed Alyla Browne) is resourceful and resilient, and her quick wits, agility and guts enable her to survive being traded by Dementus to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme filling the giant boots of the role’s original actor Hugh Keays-Byrne, who died in 2020) and to thrive in his citadel. The film skips ahead (via a telling time-lapse sequence) to find Furiosa (Taylor-Joy) in her mid-twenties, having risen through the ranks of Immortan Joe’s evil empire to become an elite Praetorian and to ride alongside Tom Burke's Praetorian Jack in a War Rig shuttling between the Wasteland’s three fortresses -—The Citadel, Bullet Farm and Gas Town — carrying cargoes of its most precious resources: food and water, munitions and fuel. And, even as Furiosa in a surprising turn forges a tender bond with the sympathetic Jack, one of the Wasteland’s rare goodies, we recognize signs that the story is converging with the starting point of the earlier film.

Furiosa doesn't dovetail perfectly with Fury Road. Making new character Dementus the focus of the new film's standalone revenge plot doesn't quite match up with the previous film's casting of Immortan Joe as the focus for Furiosa’s rage. Yet even if Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa doesn't have the Amazonian stature of Theron’s version, her ferociously tough performance fuses brilliantly with that of her predecessor. Similarly, while Furiosa lacks Fury Road’s relentless hell-for-leather pace, it doesn’t lack for turbocharged action. Indeed, some of the set piece scenes of fight and flight here are as thrilling as anything you will see in the cinema this year. Once again, the action is the product of a mix of astonishing stunt work and CGI effects, although there does seem to be more of the latter here than there was in Fury Road, which is a shame. It’s a shame, too, that Furiosa’s bond with Jack doesn’t go deeper. Still, minor quibbles aside, the foot-to-the-floor action and wonderfully weird world building are more than awesome enough.