Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #280: Mad Max 2

Mad Max 2 (1981) a.k.a The Road Warrior, is one of the reasons why Mel Gibson was once of the biggest movies stars in the world. Who is Mad Max? He is the lone hero in a post-apocalyptic world, he is the last warrior in a war-torn Australia, and the deadliest man behind the wheel of a car. George Miller’s film is a true product of the 80s. It’s all practical effects and stuntmen as cars pummel and tear each other to pieces in a battle to get the last remnant of oil after a devastating war. Everyone is dressed like they have raided a leather clothing store and they stopped at a sporting goods store for armour. There was never a lot of optimism about the future back then in the 80s, but on the plus side it made for some pretty kick-ass movies.

I have seen the entire Mad Max franchise completely out of order. The third one I saw when it was playing on TV in Spanish back in the 90s when I was living in Peru (whose roads and drivers sadly reminded me of the movie sometimes). I got to the second one years later while taking summer courses at the University of British Columbia in 2009 after I saw it was on iTunes. This is why video stores are going out of business: you can be hundreds of kilometres away from your home and rent whatever classics you want online without having to worry about late fees or waiting in line. Plus this was the summer when the first Transformers sequel came out so I felt like watching a movie sequel that actually gets the job done. No school like the old school.

Like most action movies, the story of Mad Max 2 is pretty straightforward. Following the events of the previous film, Max (Gibson) is drifting the Australian roads in search of food and petrol. Since Max’s family was murdered by a bike gang and he quit to force to hunt them down, law and order has collapsed in the wake of a global war caused by a fuel shortage. After surviving an encounter with another gang, Max runs into a drifter (Bruce Spence) who prefers to travel by air with a tiny gyrocopter. The Gyro Captain tells him of an oil refinery in the wasteland, which in the eyes of marauders is more precious than water.

Unfortunately the refinery and its inhabitants are under siege by a deadly gang. Their leader, The Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) is a beast of a man whose face is covered by a hockey mask, much like another 80s icon. He and his vicious gang of rapists and vandals offer the refinery settlers a deal: leave all the oil behind and they will get safe passage out of his territory. When a group of settlers tries to make a break for it, they are captured, tortured, raped, killed, and their bodies are used to decorate the gang’s cars. Bringing back a survivor, Max tries to make a deal of his own. In exchange for all the oil he can transport he will help the settlers by driving a tanker trailer containing all of their fuel, leading the marauders away while the settlers drive in the opposite direction.

This eventually leads to one of the most action-packed car chases ever shot. With Max behind the wheel of the tanker, Humungus’ gang give pursue him in their gas-spewing cars and bikes while the Gyro Captain follows from above. In the sun-drenched desert the pursuers fire bullets, arrows and chains at the tanker, while on top a few of the settlers try to hold them off with Molotov cocktails. Characters are blown up, burned, shot, and run over. When Max manages to shoot one of the marauders with a shotgun while still driving the tanker, a feral kid (Emil Minty) riding with Max laughs with glee.

This is clearly not the subtlest of movies. All of the evil marauders are dressed in black leather, while the good settlers and their benevolent leader Pappagallo (Michael Preston) are mostly dressed in white. But then again, if you are going to go see a movie called The Road Warrior don’t expect any Shakespeare. The Feral Kid does not even have any lines, although he does have a metal boomerang that can slice your fingers. This is Australia after all, even in a post-apocalyptic future somebody had to have a boomerang.

After the third entry in the franchise, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Gibson would go on to star in the Lethal Weapon franchise making him one of the biggest stars of the 90s. Then came the 2000s and his many, many breakdowns so who knows what’s next for Mad Mel? George Miller meanwhile branched out into family films with Babe and Happy Feet, but plans to drive back to the apocalypse with Mad Max: Fury Road in 2014. Tom Hardy had been wisely cast as Max, but good luck with topping that car chase.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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