Movie Review: Fury Road. Are We There Yet?

The title sums up this review, but if you want more, I'm still typing.  First, let's start with the good parts.  That'll keep things short:

• Acting was good.  Tom Hardy?  Charlize Thereon?  Both were their usual great selves.  They did what they could with this turkey.
• Stunts were good.  Most were "for real" with old-school film effects and only minimal CGI touch-ups.
• A few minor interesting touches here and there, like the flamethrower/guitar "piper" war-wagon.  That was cool and everybody's seen the trailers, so mentioning it isn't a spoiler.  There were a few other, similar but lesser bits sprinkled in.

Now for the bad:

• Everybody's been waiting thirty years to see Max take to the road in The Last of the V8 Interceptors again.  Set in the time between the first and second movies (sort of), it should have been prime-time for road warfare with the Road Warrior.  We got maybe three minutes of what we all came to see.
• Sans The Interceptor of course, the movie was  One.  Long.  Car.  Chase.  It got boring after a while.  I was checking my watch and wondering like a little kid in the back seat on family vacation: Are we there yet?
• Back to the time and movie sequence this is set in, it didn't make any sense.  It's obviously between the first two movies, except that about 35 years seem to have gone by.  If Miller wanted to show how things would be decades later, why not just hire pushing-60 Mel Gibson again and give us the really mad Max?
• There's been one hell of a ruckus about a "feminist" slant to this movie, but it was such a mess that any attempts at preaching thankfully got muddled under monster car wheels.
• Not only is the chronology nonsensical, so is pretty much the rest of the move.  I'd elaborate further, but I've got more meaningful things to do today.

Can we just hand this mess off to J.J. Abrams and get a watchable reboot already?

Bottom line: 1.5 out of 4 stars.

Final note: What's up with all the critics' love of this turkey?  It's pulling 98% positive ratings over at Rotten Tomatoes.  Have these people lost their minds?  Legacy media echo chamber?  Dunno, don't wanna know.

ps: Review of the original Mad Max from three years ago.  Looking back, I always intended to do reviews of Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome too.  Looks like I have some blog topics for the next few weeks, so stay tuned.