MAD MAX: FURY ROAD: SPOILER-FREE FILM-REVIEW:

Holy sh*t what an amazing film. This is a film filled with so much beautifully rich red earth and twisted, rusted V8 metal that you could be forgiven for thinking that a junk yard f*cked a desert whilst high on crystal-meth and gave birth to Mad Max: Fury Road.... and believe me that is meant as a compliment.

Thirty years since George Miller gave us 'Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome' we now get the next installment of the franchise where drunken and occasionally anti-Semitic Mel Gibson has been swapped out for the rugged and brooding Tom Hardy, whose accent is kind of all over the place. The film finds an imprisoned Max Rockastansky caught in the middle of an insane escape plot involving a one-armed Charlize Theron and five abused wives to the one dictator who is using his army of rev-heads to chase them all across the stark desert landscape in some of the most inventive car stunts ever committed to celluloid.

Now Tom Hardy began working on this film immediately after ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ back in 2012 and since then he’s starred in five movies and a TV series, with two more films in the can before this had even been released - after seeing it you can understand why. The film is essentially a two hour chase sequence that hardly stops to take a breath - with almost all the stunts and sequences done in camera, sure there are some CGI enhancements here and there but this puts other films like the Fast and Furious franchise in their place. Because where those films go for the big bang, Miller has mastered and controlled the sound and vision in such a way that every shot looks like a work of art and all the sound design has very particular purpose. Your eyes and ears can be viscously assaulted during all the chaos, and then Miller pulls back and gives us silence just to remind us just how barren the landscape is and how all this destruction has little impact on the world these characters live in.  

Keep in mind that George Miller is in his seventies now and he is giving the young directors today not just a run for their money but showing them how it should be done. Visually the colours are lush and the camera uses layers and leading lines to give depth to just how many vehicles are involved in this chase. He does character development on the move and really pulls some great performances out of everyone in the film. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is in this film and her performance here will make you forgive her for her involvement in 'Transformers Dark of the Moon'. But on top of all the adrenaline fueled action, Miller is borrowing from the masters of cinema like Kurosawa and using movement and setting to enhance characters emotional states.

The film may be call Mad Max but the real star of the movie is Charlize Theron. She's just such a bad-ass action hero that she outdoes Hardy in the fight sequences and big heroic moments, looking at a film like this you could be forgiven for thinking it's just a male testosterone-fueled car chase but at the end of day is actually the women who it is real real heroes. All the female characters in the movie are the ballsiest and strongest characters in the film, leaving a lot of their male counterparts looking weak by comparison.

On top of this the design of the vehicles just need to be seen on the big screen to be believed and truly appreciated. Each car, truck or motorcycle just has its own unique look and they just take on a life of their own becoming another character in the film, or dare I say another creature in the film.

If you’re the kind of person who feels all blockbusters are the same today then this is the film for you. It may not break the box office like The Avengers or Star Wars but it will be the film of 2015 that will be remembered and respected the most - and deservingly so. Do yourself a favour and watch this in the cinema.

Mad Max: Fury Road gets Five out of Five Stars (or Eight out of Eight V8 meth-fueled nightmare cars of awesomeness!)

MAGGIE: SPOILER-FREE FILM-REVIEW:

Hey, did you know that Arnold Schwarzenegger is an actor now? Yeah that’s right, Mr. “Get to the Choppa”, “Let off some steam Bennet”, “Ice to see you”, “Don’t drink and bake” is an actor now in the new indie zombie film Maggie.

Maggie follows the story of a Midwest farmer (with a thick Austrian accent) caring for his recently infected teenage daughter who has been swept up in the middle of a worldwide zombie epidemic. Being an indie film, instead of focusing on the infection at large we see the outbreak from the perspective of one small family on their farm, this ends up being the films greatest strength but also its biggest weakness. The film is a slow-burn but probably too slow, as the gory and tense moments are too few and far between to feel like genuine pay-offs. 

The film is classified, and has been advertised, as a zombie movie and to be fair it has a few zombie movie elements but it has forgotten to do some of the key things that make a zombie movie a good zombie movie. Firstly, the rules about killing zombies is not entirely clear, you can destroy the brain or just break their neck apparently. Secondly, for a world infested with zombies, people don’t seem to be working all that hard at defending themselves or protecting their properties. And even though the world of the film is structured so that victims with the virus can stay at home until they turn, there doesn’t seem to be very much regulation or enforcement on this rule - I mean geez just look at what happens when flu season hits - it just doesn’t seem plausible. 

However, it’s because of this set up that we get this sometimes good slow-burn drama leading towards what can only end in a messy, messy way. The performances are great, with Abigail Breslin bringing some real heartache to the role as a teenager struggling with the fact that she is dying, but also dealing with being an outcast in her own home and community. Her one supporter, whose love never waivers, is the surprise casting choice of 68 year old Arnold Schwarzenegger as her father, who really plays to his strengths here. He only has about 12 lines in the film but it’s just seeing such an aged and weathered icon looking broken, it’s a side of him I haven’t seen before and it does keep you engaged for the most part.

Now don’t get me wrong, I would have killed to see a zombie-movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.... back in 1993, and to his credit he does really well in this role and avoids falling into any of the normal “Arnie-isms” that you’d expect to see in one of his films. I can’t help but think that if he’d done a few more roles like this earlier in his career then maybe people would have been more excited to see him return to cinema after all those years in office.

Overall, Maggie is set-up to be a naval-gazing indie-drama about one man and his dying daughter that just happens to feature zombies. But it really falls short on maintaining your interest due to the long gaps between dramatic scenes. It does have a sweetly tense ending but feels a lot longer than its 95 minute running time - and not in a good way.

Maggie gets Two out Five Stars (or poetic metaphors for teenage venereal diseases)