"Mad Max: Fury Road" with Tom Hardy hits theaters on Friday but it is already assured box office glory as a reboot of the franchise that made Mel Gibson a household name in the 1980s.
Hardy, whose showing as Bane in "The Dark Knight Rises" left fans on the edge of their seats, takes the action a giant step forward as the protagonist in the post-apocalyptic road-rage flick, playing Gibson's Max Rockatansky character.
A.O. Scott of The New York Times suggested that "Mad Max" is this year's anti-"Avengers: Age of Ultron," with his crudeness and grittiness.
"Unlike, say, 'Avengers: Age of Ultron,' 'Fury Road' does not usher you into a bright corporate universe where everything has been branded to within an inch of its life," Scott wrote. "The branding you witness here reminds you of the cruel etymology of the word, as a death's-head insignia — the mark of a tyrannical CEO known as Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) — is scorched into the flesh of people destined to live as property."
Brian Viner of the Daily Mail gave Mad Max four out of five stars for its high-octane energy and Hardy's performance.
"A relentless two-hour assault both on the eardrums and the eyeballs, 'Mad Max: Fury Road' is the craziest film of the year so far – and one of the loudest of all time. For anyone missing 'Top Gear,' here it is on steroids. Really, really strong ones. Even Jeremy Clarkson might recoil from the stench of testosterone," he wrote.
Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com praised director and co-writer George Miller for his heart-pumping scenes that would give "Furious 7" a challenge for vehicular film mayhem.
"From its very first scenes, 'Fury Road' vibrates with the energy of a veteran filmmaker working at the top of his game, pushing us forward without the cheap special effects or paper-thin characters that have so often defined the modern summer blockbuster," Tallerico wrote.
While
Nicholas Barber of BBC News gave the move four of five stars, he wrote that the film fails to become the best it could have been.
"Miller has never been too interested in fashioning rounded personalities, nor is he concerned with intricate plotting," Barber wrote. "Essentially, all that happens in 'Fury Road' is that Max and (company) drive in one direction, and then they turn around and drive in the other. It's this weakness in the script that stops the film being a classic, but that's not to say it's entirely brainless."
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