Dad Movies #1: 'Furiosa' Is a Good Action Movie Cursed by Its Connection to the Best Action Movie
Wingardium Furiosa
Welcome to Dad Movies, a Dad Shows sub-blog where I occasionally check in with action flicks, crime thrillers, Westerns, and war movies.
Action movies are inherently Dad Movies. Some are more Dad-coded than others, but there are very few that Dads would say “I wouldn’t watch that” about. Maybe some of the terrible straight-to-Netflix ones. But for the most part, the only genre more synonymous with Dad Movies than action is Western.
So it goes without saying that Furiosa is a Dad Movie. It’s part of the Mad Max series, a canonical Dad Franchise. For 45 years, dads all over the world have been saying “guzzoline” every chance they get. For the past nine years, they’ve been saying “WITNESS ME!” before they fart.
The Mad Max movies are essentially Westerns, with Max as the wandering gunslinger and the post-apocalyptic Australian outback as the frontier dotted with communities he drifts into and reluctantly helps out. Furiosa exists in a slightly different genre, the revenge Western. Post-apocalyptic truck driver Furiosa seeks revenge on the schnozzy warlord Dementus, who killed her mother and kidnapped her when she was a child.
It’s a simple plot, but not as simple as Mad Max: Fury Road, which has one of the simplest plots any movie has ever had. Its stripped-down simplicity is one of the main reasons why it’s so great. Very little has to be explained in dialogue, which allows for easily understandable visual storytelling instead. The characters’ goals are very clear: they want to find freedom in the Green Place of Many Mothers, and when they find out that’s not possible, they want to get back to the Citadel and create freedom there. The simplicity of the plot and emphasis on visual storytelling frees director George Miller and his actors to focus on big, powerful emotions. Charlize Theron kneeling in the desert screaming at the sky is an unforgettable cinematic image that I like to imitate when I can’t find my keys.
Furiosa is much more complicated than Fury Road, and not nearly as good. Furiosa’s goal is unclear, especially compared to her goal in Fury Road. Does she want revenge, or does she want to return to the Green Place? At one point, she seems to want Dementus to bring her mother back to life, and I couldn’t tell if she was being literal or not. The storytelling in Furiosa is imprecise. I guess she wants both revenge and to return to the Green Place, and being unable to achieve the latter, she settles for just the former — with the ironic twist that she uses Dementus’ body to keep a small piece of the Green Place alive. But Fury Road doesn’t require any of that interpretation after the fact, you get what I’m saying? You don’t have to think about it to understand it. You just have to feel it.
Furiosa has too much dialogue. The movie doesn’t have full faith in its visual storytelling, so it overcompensates with having characters stand around and talk about what’s going on. This leads to scenes being too long, which leads to the movie being too long. At two-and-a-half-hours, Furiosa is a half-hour longer than Fury Road.
I had other problems with Furiosa, but Dad Shows is about celebrating fun stuff, not picking nits. The action sequences are of course thrilling, Anya Taylor-Joy is convincingly furious, and Chris Hemsworth is a hoot as Dementus. It’s pretty incredible that he’s having so much fun, considering how by all accounts how brutally unfun Mad Max movies are to make. Taylor-Joy said it will be 20 years before she can even talk about it. But Hemsworth put on a big fake nose, processed some of his insecurity issues through character work, and had a grand old time. Furiosa is a really good action movie. It just has the misfortune of being inevitably compared to one of the greatest action movies ever made.
What really blows me away about the Mad Max movies is the expansiveness and specificity of George Miller’s vision. Imagine having all this in your head? Thank God that cinema exists, because he’d have no other way to communicate this. No disrespect to novels, but they can’t make the sound of the roar of an engine. If he didn’t get hundreds of millions of dollars to excavate his mind-wasteland, he would probably go insane, and we’d all be worse off for it.
I feel the need to acknowledge that Furiosa is flopping at the box office, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with it being a Dad Movie, so I don’t actually have much to say about it. In retrospect, it was inevitable. Prequels always underperform relative to sequels, and Fury Road wasn’t that big of a hit in the first place. Furiosa’s bigger issue is that it won’t be a classic like Fury Road. Oh well.
-I forgot to include my review of Apple TV+’s The Big Cigar for TheWrap in my last newsletter, so here it is now. I think Huey P. Newton is one of the most fascinating figures in relatively recent American history, and this limited series doesn’t live up to him.
-I reviewed Netflix’s Eric for TV Guide. Benedict Cumberbatch is an alcoholic dad with a missing son. Why are puppeteers always depicted as such assholes?
So much talk about box office numbers and opening weekend projections recently. Like you said, movies are about fun and sometimes it feels like people have just forgotten how to fun at the cinema. I’m looking forward to checking out Furiosa. Also went into The Fall Guy after reading all of the box office discourse, but it in no way affected my enjoyment of the movie or my decision to go see it.