Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

“Mad Max 2” (released in the USA as “The Road Warrior”), released in 1981, is a film of pure action, of dynamic energy centered on the simplest possible tale of a plot. It has a look of a violent future world, but it doesn’t make that look with characters and dialogue. It would rather dive headfirst into one of the most ruthlessly bellicose movies ever made. Roger Ebert said in his review, “I walked out of "Mad Max 2" 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 time in the future when civilization has fallen, anarchy and violence rule in the world, and traveling bands of bandits kill each other for the few remaining gas stations. The cars of these future fighters are leftovers from the time we currently live in now. Ebert listed, “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 search sale of legends, myths and genres: They look and act like the biker gang from the 1960s, samurai warriors, kamikaze pilots, street-gang members, cowboys, cops, and racecar drivers. They hardly have any dialogue. The movie’s protagonist, Max, might have 200 words. Max is reprised by Mel Gibson, an actor who studied in an Australian school and starred in “Gallipoli.” Before that, he made “Mad Max” for the makers of “Mad Max 2,” and that film was a low-budget precursor to this spectacular of action and violence.

Max’s role in “Mad Max 2” is to act like how some sort of a heroic cowboy might have in a classic Western. He encounters a small band of people who are trying to protect their supplies of gasoline from the attacks of warriors who have them cornered. Max agrees 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 statement is made with a great amount of symbolism, ritual and violence (and snot so much dialogue that sometimes we have to guess what’s happening), the movie arrives at its true braveries.

The main drive in “Mad Max 2” is an unbelievably well-made chase part that takes up the last third of the film, as Max and his semi-trailer drive through a rampage of everything the villains can throw at them.

Ebert mentioned, “The director of "Mad Max 2," 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 "Mad Max 2," 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 amazing. “Mad Max 2” goes on a short list, which includes “Bullitt,” “The French Connection,” and the truck chase in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as those that are the great chase films of modern years.

What is the point of the movie? Ebert advises, “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 created a fictional future. It goes along with its special rules and values, and we experience it. The experience is scary, sometimes disgusting, and (if truth be told) exciting. This is very masterful filmmaking, and “Mad Max 2” is a movie like no other.

Anyone who has seen this movie will clearly tell you that it’s better than the first one. Whereas the first one was a low-budget exploitation flick turned revenge story at the end, this one is a chase movie and portrayed it wonderfully with how Max is trying to help these people run from a gang of people who want their gasoline through a series of great chase sequences. It was the first movie to give Max his style of being in the desert and focusing on the loner that is Max. Definitely check this one out.

Sadly, with how great these movies got, in comes the third flick which is weird, bizarre, and no one’s favorite…scratch that, Nostalgia Critic likes it. Just brace yourselves next week for the third entry in “Mad Max Month.”