Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
1979’s Mad Max was an action film that quite literally became a quantum leap for its genre, featuring car chases and violence that blew away anything that had come before it including everything that had been seen in American cinema as well and on a low budget at that. It had also legitimized George Miller as a directing force to be reckoned with and made a huge worldwide star out of Mel Gibson as the last man standing being a cop fighting the war for civilized society and becoming a broken man as a result after the deaths of his family. In 1981, this sequel was produced with a substantially larger budget and the returns of both Gibson and Miller, and while this has earned its place amongst the eyes of many as also being one of the All Time Great Action Films, it has also been wrongly elevated in some circles as being even BETTER than the groundbreaking original, something it doesn’t quite achieve (watching Max’s descent into madness in the first one alone made Gibson’s acting more fascinating there), but there is still lots of diesel fueled testosterone on display through its wild story that did happen to emulate old school American Westerns such as Shane. The story as it turns out begins with the concept that after Max limped off alone into the wasteland at the end of Part 1, a worldwide nuclear war (only hinted at in the original as seeming almost imminent) had indeed broken out and decimated civilization, reducing it to little more than rubble and anarchy (kind of a posthumous victory for the first film’s villain in Toecutter who was definitely angling for ruling over a society such as this when it happened). The film then immediately jumps into a wild chase scene with Max (still driving his V8 Interceptor cop car from the original) being pursued by some wild marauders led by Wez (Vernon Welles, essaying one of the most iconic henchmen in film history by just going completely nuts as if in a permanent maniacal state) before finally running them off as we learn that what IS left of humanity is centered almost completely around the obtaining of gasoline in order to move around. In fact, every time any vehicle is run off the road, the perpetrators always make straight for that precious leaking gold so that their rampages on the road may continue. Max soon encounters an awkwardly strange Gyro Captain (complete with equally awkward patches of comic relief) played by Bruce Spence in a role that manages to both further the story and also annoy us with bits like kissing up to Max in a way that makes him appear to be a sidekick that Max doesn’t even want. Eventually Max comes upon the REAL conflict in the story, that being between two factions one of which is a peaceful community sitting on a tanker full of gas and the other being the group that Wez is a part of, a bunch of barbaric, scavenging marauders with a taste for S&M style leather gear and led by a muscle bound, possibly deformed weirdo wearing a hockey mask known as Lord Humongous (who certainly helped to inspire the basic look for Friday The 13th’s Jason Voorhees when he began sporting a hockey mask the very next year in Part 3 of that series). But Humongous is portrayed rather strangely for such a supposedly all powerful villain, as he certainly sees plenty of insubordination from his own troops (especially Wez) and his tendency to want to back off as soon as he sees one of his own get taken down rather handily during the initial confrontation (that being Wez’s pretty boy biker companion who would seem to be his gay lover but whom Vernon Welles himself claimed was really just someone whom Wez had raised and was like a father to) makes him seem weaker than a master bad guy should be and is certainly a far cry from the demonic biker cult leader Toecutter from the original who in many ways was truly unforgettable in terms of the acting while Humongous just appears to be a big guy with a mask. Of course, not everyone might be aware of the original intended twist for the Humongous character from the first draft of the script where he was to be revealed as being “Goose”, Max’s jovial cop partner from the first film who had gotten horribly burned and left for dead, but Miller chose to remove that story element at the last minute even as it might explain Humongous’ rather misguided humanity at times, reigning in Wez who wants to burn, pillage and kill right NOW NOW NOW and then offering an unusual truce of sorts to the peaceful faction that if they just quietly walk away from their oil supplies right now, he will spare their lives and even offer them safe passage through the wasteland (aw what a guy!), an agreement which he deems as being an “honorable” one. Indeed, the issues of honor and of keeping one’s word seem to be a minor running theme throughout the movie, particularly in the way that Max (who says that he is only out for himself and whatever gas he can get his hands on) deals with the peaceful faction and its members, particularly their leader (Michael Preston, who gives a surprisingly good performance here and would later star in the low budget sci fi cult classic Metalstorm: The Destruction Of Jared Syn) who is himself an honorable individual, and a crazy yet memorable little Feral Boy (Emil Minty) who besides Max is probably the most lethal killer amongst the good guys. Rather than walk away from the only real thing that would guarantee their survival, the peaceful faction decides to haul everything they have on a 2000 mile journey to an Australian beachside community which is (presumably) well guarded enough to keep out any scavengers and thus allow them to live out their lives in a tropical paradise. After Max assists them in obtaining a flatbed rig to carry out the tanker with, the race is then on for the last twenty minutes of the film, with Humongous, Wez, and the rest of their crew doing everything they can to intercept them and prevent the completion of their journey with Max himself acting as the driver of the rig (possibly because he thinks of it as being a suicide mission and possibly as revenge for the destruction of his beloved Interceptor earlier in the film) and it is here that the film truly earns its credentials as being an all time action classic with several major characters on both sides meeting their demises and some absolutely insane motorcycle stunts (including one that was clearly a stunt gone wrong where the stuntman should have been killed but instead suffered a broken leg while the moment itself was captured and preserved on film for all time as part of the sequence). All of it is quite spectacular, but very little of it retains the rather subtle psychological aspects that the first film embodied where Max’s psyche was crumbling in much the same way that the world around him did and the bleakness of the original’s ending is meant to be supplanted by what’s supposed to be his “redemption” here showing him helping these people out in a conflict which he has no part of (save of course for Wez vowing revenge on him from the opening scene and the fact that Humongous and his men would have eventually claimed his life especially if he refused to join their savage ranks). There can be no doubt though about the movie star appeal of Gibson himself, successfully carrying the film on almost sheer presence alone while only being given 16 full lines of dialogue, making his Max here into not only a guy who depends on his instincts, but one for whom the audience can almost SENSE his instincts and what he’s thinking at any given time without him uttering a word. Basically, this is just lots more proof that Gibson had carried an edgy on screen charisma that was unique only to him, riding the character for one more sequel before the terrible decision was made 30 years later for Part 4 (when he was already interested and had been attached for some time) to replace him with a lesser actor even though Gibson himself had still retained his looks and was in great shape for a man his age merely because the media had blown up some of his personal problems into a worldwide scandal, thus robbing us of one more opportunity to see him play a role which he had managed to embody and define, that of an anti hero whose negative traits had made him just as fascinating as his heroic ones…
8/10