Mad Max II (The Road Warrior)
1981
Director: George Miller
Cast Includes: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Vernon Wells, Mike Preston, Virginia Hey, Emil Minty, Kjell Nilsson
Prequel: Mad Max
Sequel: Mad Max III - Beyond Thunderdome
MS Cinemania 1994 - Leonard Maltin Review:
Sequel to Mad Max finds Max, now a loner, reluctantly helping tiny oil-producing community defend itself against band of depraved crazies thirsty for precious fuel. Far less original script-wise, but trend-setting visual design and some of the most unbelievable car stunts ever filmed make this equal to, if not better than, the first one. Retitled The Road Warrior for American release.
From MS Cinemania 1994 - Roger Ebert Review:
The Road Warrior is a film of pure action, of kinetic energy organized around the barest possible bones of a plot. It has a vision of a violent future world, but it doesn't develop that vision with characters and dialogue. It would rather plunge headlong into one of the most relentlessly aggressive movies ever made. I walked out of The Road Warrior a little dizzy and with my ears still ringing from the roar of the sound track; I can't say I "enjoyed" the film, but I'll hardly forget it. The movie takes place at a point in the future when civilization has collapsed, anarchy and violence reign in the world, and roaming bands of marauders kill each other for the few remaining stores of gasoline. The vehicles of these future warriors are leftovers from the world we live in now. There are motorcycles and semi-trailer trucks and oil tankers that are familiar from the highways of 1982, but there are also bizarre customized racing cars, of which the most fearsome has two steel posts on its front to which enemies can be strapped (if the car crashes, the enemies are the first to die).
The road warriors of the title take their costumes and codes of conduct from a rummage sale of legends, myths, and genres: They look and act like Hell's Angels, samurai warriors, kamikaze pilots, street-gang members, cowboys, cops, and race drivers. They speak hardly at all; the movie's hero, Max, has perhaps two hundred words. Max is played by Mel Gibson, an Australian actor who starred in Gallipoli. Before that, he made Mad Max for the makers of The Road Warrior, and that film was a low-budget forerunner to this extravaganza of action and violence. Max's role in The Road Warrior is to behave something like a heroic cowboy might have in a classic Western. He happens upon a small band of people who are trying to protect their supplies of gasoline from the attacks of warriors who have them surrounded. Max volunteers to drive a tanker full of gasoline through the surrounding warriors and take it a few hundred miles to the coast, where they all hope to find safety. After this premise is established with a great deal of symbolism, ritual, and violence (and so few words that sometimes we have to guess what's happening), the movie arrives at its true guts. The set piece in The Road Warrior is an unbelievably well-sustained chase sequence that lasts for the last third of the film, as Max and his semi-trailer run a gauntlet of everything the savages can throw at them.
The director of The Road Warrior, George Miller, compares this chase sequence to Buster Keaton's The General, and I can see what he means. Although The General is comedic, it's also very exciting, as Keaton, playing the engineer of a speeding locomotive, runs an endless series of variations on the basic possibilities of two trains and several sets of railroad tracks. In The Road Warrior, there is basically a truck and a road. The pursuers and defenders have various kinds of cars and trucks to chase or defend the main truck, and the whole chase proceeds at breakneck speed as quasi-gladiators leap through the air from one racing truck to another, more often than not being crushed beneath the wheels. The special effects and stunts in this movie are spectacular; The Road Warrior goes on a short list with Bullitt, The French Connection, and the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark as among the great chase films of modern years.
What is the point of the movie? Everyone is free to interpret the action, I suppose, but I prefer to avoid thinking about the implications of gasoline shortages and the collapse of Western civilization, and to experience the movie instead as pure sensation. The filmmakers have imagined a fictional world. It operates according to its special rules and values, and we experience it. The experience is frightening, sometimes disgusting, and (if the truth be told) exhilarating. This is very skillful filmmaking, and The Road Warrior is a movie like no other.
MS Cinemania 1994 - Pauline Kael Review:
Set in a post-apocalyptic Wasteland, this Australian film, a sequel to the 1979 Mad Max known as Mad Max 2 as well as The Road Warrior in other countries, is a mutant, sprung from virtually all action genres. George Miller, who directed, may have been content to make an openly sophomoric bash in Mad Max - it was a revenge fantasy turned into a futuristic cartoon - but this time he's in the mythmaking business. The film is one continuous spurt of energy, and the jangly, fast editing suggests wit; so does the broad blacktop highway that cuts across the desert nothingness. And the rampaging vandals - punkish post-nuclear-war bikers, led by a masked bodybuilder called the Humungus - are s-m comic-strip terrors; they menace the decent folk, in more barbarous and gaudier versions of the way the wild motorcyclists in Roger Corman pictures did. But the picture is abstract in an adolescent way. Miller's attempt to tap into the universal concept of the hero (as enunciated by Jung and explicated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces) makes the film joyless. He consciously uses his hero, Max (Mel Gibson), as an icon; that's enough to squeeze the juice out of any actor, and Max seems bland and apathetic. There are perhaps 10 minutes of spectacular imagery, and if you think of George Miller as one of the kinetic moviemakers, such as John Carpenter and George A. Romero, he's a giant, but he's pushing for more and he apparently doesn't see the limitations of the kind of material he's working with. For all its huffing and puffing, this is a sappy sentimental movie. With Bruce Spence as the stork-legged aviator and Vernon Wells as Wez; the script is by Terry Hayes and Miller, with Brian Hannant. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In.
The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction:
The success of the first film in series, Mad Max, generated a bigger budget for this, the second. It was well used, and this is a more sophisticated film, more purely sf than its predecessor. The oil wars have left a devastated world; petrol is a medium of exchange, and its conspicuous use - by burning it up on the roads - confers status. Ex-policeman Max Rockatansky (Gibson) gives reluctant assistance to a semicivilized group in a desert fortress. Possessing a valuable petrol supply, they are beleagured by a tribe of marauders (who, in this Westerns replay, are effectively the Indians), designer-barbarians in fetishistic gear on motorbikes and vehicles of war. Made with poker-faced humour, and this time with the US prints allowed to retain Mel Gibson's Australian drawl, the film is enlived by small details - eg. the Feral Kid (Minty) with his razor sharp metal boomarang - and has much to recommend it beyond the tautly directed scenes of vehicular warfare. Poignant use is made of memories when times were better. The name of the sleazy real-world coastal resort Surfer's Paradise is now only half-remembered, as 'Paradise', and ironically the place becomes the Promised Land to which the civilized remnants (minus the loner, Max) finally treks. With all its comic-strip energy and vividness, this is exploitation cinema at its most inventive.
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updated february 2010