MS Cinemania 1994 - Leonard Maltin Review:

In the desolate future Mad Max comes upon Turner's cutthroat city of Bartertown, survives a battle-to-the-death in Roman-style Thunderdome arena, and is exiled to the desert, where he's rescued by tribe of wild children. Thunderous film has lots of action and stunts, and even some philosophical moments, but lacks the kinetic energy of Mad Max 2.

From MS Cinemania 1994 - Roger Ebert Review:

It's not supposed to happen this way. Sequels are not supposed to be better than the movies that inspired them. The third movie in a series isn't supposed to create a world more complex, more visionary, and more entertaining than the first two. Sequels are supposed to be creative voids. But now here is Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, not only the best of the three Mad Max movies, but one of the best films of 1985.

From its opening shot of a bizarre vehicle being pulled by camels through the desert, Mad Max III places us more firmly within its apocalyptic postnuclear world than ever before. We are some years in the future; how many, it is hard to say, but so few years that the frames and sheet metal of 1985 automobiles are still being salvaged for makeshift new vehicles of bizarre design. And yet enough years that a new society is taking shape. The bombs have fallen, the world's petroleum supplies have been destroyed, and in the deserts of Australia, mankind has found a new set of rules and started on a new game.

The driver of the camels is Mad Max (Mel Gibson), former cop, now sort of a free-lance nomad. After his vehicle is stolen and he is left in the desert to die, he makes his way somehow to Bartertown, a quasi-Casablanca hammered together out of spare parts. Bartertown is where you go to buy, trade, or sell anything—or anybody. It is supervised by a Sydney Greenstreet-style fat man named the Collector (Frank Thring), and ruled by an imperious queen named Aunty Entity (Tina Turner).

And it is powered by an energy source that is, in its own way, a compelling argument against nuclear war: In chambers beneath Bartertown, countless pigs live and eat and defecate, and from their waste products, Turner's soldiers generate methane gas. This leads to some of the movie's most memorable moments, as Mad Max and others wade knee-deep in piggy-do.

Tina Turner herself lives far above the masses, in a birds'-nest throne room perched high overhead. And as Mad Max first visits Turner's sky palace, I began to realize how completely the director, George Miller, had imagined this future world. It has the crowding and the variety of a movie crossroads, but it also has a riot of hairstyles and costume design, as if these desperate creatures could pause from the daily struggle for survival only long enough to invent new punk fashions. After the clothes, the hair, the crowding, the incessant activity, the spendthrift way in which Miller fills his screen with throwaway details, Bartertown becomes much more than a movie set—it's an astounding address of the imagination, a place as real as Bogart's Casablanca or Orson Welles's Xanadu or the Vienna of The Third Man. That was even before the movie introduced me to Thunderdome, the arena for Bartertown's hand-to-hand battles to the death.

Thunderdome is the first really original movie idea about how to stage a fight since we got the first karate movies. The "dome" is a giant upside-down framework bowl. The spectators scurry up the sides of the bowl, and look down on the fighters. But the combatants are not limited to fighting on the floor of the arena. They are placed on harnesses with long elastic straps, so that they can leap from top to bottom and from side to side with great lethal bounds. Thunderdome is to fighting as three-dimensional chess is to a flat board. And the weapons available to the fighters are hung from the inside of the dome: Cleavers, broadaxes, sledge-hammers, the inevitable chainsaw.

It is into Thunderdome that Mad Max goes for his showdown with Aunty Entity's greatest warrior, and George Miller's most original creation, a character named Master-Blaster, who is actually two people. Blaster is a giant hulk of a man in an iron mask. Master is a dwarf who rides him like a chariot, standing in an iron harness above his shoulders. The fight between Mad Max and Master-Blaster is one of the great creative action scenes in the movies.

There is a lot more in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The descent into the pig world, for example, and the visit to a sort of postwar hippie commune, and of course the inevitable final chase scene, involving car, train, truck, cycle, and incredible stunts. This is a movie that strains at the leash of the possible, a movie of great visionary wonders.

The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction:

This Australian film, the second sequel to the post-holocaust movie Mad Max, has lots of well directed action but is more rambling and less focused than its predecessors. Max finds a community in the desert, Bartertown, with a female warlord (Tina Turner), gladiatorial games, and a great many extras being noisy, dirty and primitave. This lively stuff is no more than a rehash of a great many filmic cliches, notably those Italian sword-and-scandal epics. Far more interesting is a sub-plot set in a different part of the desert and involving a tribe of children who are now living in an oasis, having many years ago survived a plane crash in which all the adults were killed. In perhaps the first attempt in cinema to achieve, albeit less complexly, something of what Russel Hoban achieved in Riddley Walker, they speak a developed language; they also have a mythology involving a messiah-figure, whom they take Mad Max to be. Their final return to the derilict ghost-city of Sydney is well done, and this whole inventive section about the children - pure sf, and ambitious sf at that - makes an otherwise routinely vivid film well woth watching. The novelization is Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), by Joan D Vinge.