When you start off with your credits naming The Toecutter as a main character, it’s going to be interesting. There’s car crashes. There’s motorcycle crashes. There’s camper crashes. There’s cars crashing into camper crashes. And that’s just like the first 10 minutes!
Set “A few years from now…” we find the world of police officer Max Fuckin Rockatansky (no relation to Nicolas Fuckin Cage) in a bit of dissarray. with everything being a bit of a shitshow. Crime seems pretty rampant, and a lot of the cops that need to bust em don’t really seem to be the best quality in aptitude. But theys got a job to do, and it seems a lot of the resolutions to their catching the bad guys end with car chases and meatwagons. Alls I can say is, we need more cabarets. That shit is poppin!
While relatively light on plot, there’s enough to tie together what has become a pretty vagabond kind of world. Not just the criminals, but the breakdown of the “legal system” seems a bit shoddy, too. Huh! Cop shop is a shithole, grafitti everywhere, things don’t seem like they’re in too good of shape. And then there’s Max, pushed to the edge. He knows the danger. He wants to escape the darkness that slowly but surely draws him in. These are his trials, communicated with a shitload of cool cars, motorcycles, and destruction thereof. I’m not really a car guy, but damn that V8 Interceptor is the tits.
This movie basically set up putting Mel Gibson on the map, at least for American audiences, with its sequel Mad Max 2, or known better as The Road Warrior. Director George Miller did a great job here with some crazy stuntwork and overall decent enough “pacing” to give the characters a little depth when not burning rubber down the roads (and then usually but not always exploding). As most directors do, he hones that to create a better film with the sequel to this. The Thunderdome one? Haven’t seen it in a looong time, I’ll revisit. After moving on to directing a lot of…not even close to similar-themed movies, he returned to the Mad Max world in 2015 for what I consider a pretty Road Warrior-worthy sequel, but that is a drunken review for another time.
