As a child, I was fond of watching the old Warner Brothers cartoons, you know: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, and of course the Road Runner.
Road Runner is an amusing cartoon series, where the laws of physics, particularly those of gravity, are defied, and there are frequent explosions and high velocity crashes as the Coyote pursues the Road Runner across the desert. Apparently this did inspire the most violence amongst children of any cartoon show, although I have no source to cite for this assertion other than one of my high school teachers.
The closest thing to Road Runner in modern cinema is the Mad Max franchise. The plot of each film consists of a Road Runner-like hero (Mad Max) defying the Coyotesque villains (all of whom seem almost to be mutants in their grotesqueness) in a race across a post apocalyptic wasteland involving high speeds, ultra violence, and many crashes and explosions.
One of the improvements over Road Runner in Mad Max is that the villains have some pretty good lines – particularly the Lord Humungus (the Ayatollah of the Rock and Rolla) in Mad Max 2. Not Shakespearean by any means, but the villains are quite entertaining.
I believe that Mad Max 3 (ie Beyond Thunderdome) might have been the last film I saw at the Grand Footscray, back in August 1985. [For those who are curious, the Grand closed down as a cinema in 1987 and became a bingo hall for a few years, and has since then been disused for very many years.]
It took 30 years for Mad Max 4 (Fury Road) to come out. Sadly, Mel Gibson was gone from the role that made him a star, but I did not mind seeing Tom Hardy step into it, and for Charlize Theron as the Imperator Furiosa (although as a student of Latin, I am offended by the incorrect gender usage – she should have been the Imperatrix Furiosa).
Now, almost a decade later, we have a prequel to Mad Max 4, Furiosa, which focuses on that most interesting of the supporting characters in that film. Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role originated by Theron a decade ago, and does a great job of it.
Commentators have been talking about the failure of Furiosa at the box office, despite all the hype leading up to it. There probably will be some arguing that having a female lead is another of those instances of Go Woke, Go Broke, and perhaps that is the case, as it appears to be in the Disneyfication of Star Wars.
But that does not really matter to me. Furiosa is a very fun film, just as the Road Runner cartoons are fun. We have everyone having fun playing the roles of monstrous and narcissistic villains, and lots of car chases and explosions. The henchmen are, as they always have been, a heady blend of pathetic and grotesque, particularly Scrotus and Rectus (I laughed out loud when they were introduced).
The scene where the warlord Dementus comes with his bikie hoarde to the Citadel and tries to persuade the denizens of this fortress to displace their ruler, Immortan Joe, has the sort of soliloquy that is reminiscent of the Lord Humungus in Mad Max 2. It is not going to get Chris Hemsworth an Oscar nomination, but I enjoyed it just as much as when I watched the earlier Mad Max films.
And having Furiosa as the main character? I did not mind it at all, particularly as she has been given more depth than what we had previously known about her, and arguably more than Mad Max himself (although character development is not really that important or necessary in Mad Max).
And she does a fantastic job of shooting people, running people over, and blowing things up, which is what Mad Max movies really are all about.
Just like the Road Runner.
Lost For Words! 