The Road Warrior (1981)

Rewatched 6/3/24 (MAX)

Try as I might over the years to fall in line with the internet’s hailing of Fury Road as the true messianic Max movie, I can’t escape a personal preference for The Road Warrior. Despite Fury Road’s almost endless action, most of it quite astonishing, there are lulls in the 2015 film’s plotting, set piecing, and atmosphere that I just never find in Max’s second big-screen outing, even in the face of many opportunities for such shortcomings.

Made for around just 4.5 million Aussie bucks (which would equate to about just 13 million US Dollars today), the 1981 sequel to 1979’s Mad Max was a critical and commercial success back in its day, picking up new fans around the globe and achieving 36 million ‘81 USD in Box Office monies.

The 1979 original Max film, which met if not raised the bar on alliterative, firearm-positive action movies set by The Dirty Dozen and Jeremiah Johnson, on a shoestring budget, mind you, was also a success—enough to garner a strong reputation in the opinions of genre fans and the ability to pump out a sequel, but director George Miller decided that with more money, he wouldn’t just raise the bar again, he would launch that bar out of a cannon and into the stratosphere. Immediately in this film we’re treated to an overhaul on upgrading the first movie’s iconic visual style, full of old-school dissolves and Western-inspired mega-vistas not quite reached in quality or scope in the first film. While that film, too, displayed a knack for idiosyncratic editing and iterative visual design, it was all a bit more confined, restrained. There are still real towns; there’s still a society to speak of. The weirdness of the world-gone-mad can only go so far on that movie’s baby of a budget. The Road Warrior does not suffer from those same handcuffs, and to tie it back to Fury Road which I do believe to be guilty of this, TRW doesn’t suffer from any undesirable green screens or color grading choices when it comes to its setting.

Mad Max, though, despite its title, waits a surprisingly long time before you get to see the madness of its titular character, forcing you to sit on the edge of your seat as the director builds his world, heroes, and villains in classic exploitation veins. It’s a perfectly watchable but much more static representation of the character, no doubt due to the budget only allowing for so much mad [m]action. The Road Warrior, however, decides that it will use its budget to not just scale up the post-apocalyptic landscapes teased in the first film, but to give a fully new visual language to the film world that mixes cowboy with metal, horse with horsepower.

In an obvious but wholly influential move, director/co-writer George Miller and team were able to stretch this new budget to combine Australia’s subtle badlands beauty with some of the most in-your-face, dangerous stunt work ever put to screen in order to formulate a new style altogether. It allows for Miller’s cinematic tendencies like those dissolves and a reluctance to write normal dialogue, if any dialogue, to force us into focusing on things done so well by the below-the-line departments such as casting (where the hell did they find all these interesting faces!?) and sound design (boy are those crash noises ferocious). It’s a near-silent B-movie that gets its A’s in the technical categories, which hadn’t really been done at the time…not nearly this well, at least. A shrine to cool, this movie features some of the most memorable character, vehicle, and set piece designs of the ‘80s, a decade ripe with a fascinating ugliness that The Road Warrior really pushes to the extreme. It’s a truly black-hearted piece of entertainment that isn’t afraid to hurt or kill any of its characters.

Max this go-around is still piloting his black Police Interceptor, perhaps the most badass car ever invented? And Mel Gibson is back at his expressive best, a skill he would later reach his peak of in the Lethal Weapon franchise, combining his emotive facial movements with peak manic ‘80s Shane Black dialogue there. In The Road Warrior, Gibson has his fewest lines in any of his three Max films, having embraced the lone-gunman, man-with-no-name beat after wandering the wastelands for what must be years at this point based on his rough, beaten appearance. The fatigued leather cop uniform and bulky, gnarly leg brace also reappear to display their wearer as the ultimate threat, the man in black who has survived worse already than you can possibly throw his way.

Throughout the film, Max is bruised, bloodied, disheveled, stolen from, and nearly killed in a myriad of ways, all contributing toward his ever-convincing aesthetic. It’s choices like these visual directorial ones that get the audience on Max’s side. Awesome car, fun pooch (the dog toy+shotgun combo is an all-timer!), sweet clothes, and the overall look of an underdog to root for.

The film really moves through its perfectly-paced 94 minutes, alternating between the simple rotation of high-gear action, imaginative character introductions, and just enough Max character development to ensure we stay invested in the endgame. That’s really it. Max goes to a town, meets a bunch of interesting-looking characters, and helps them defeat a bunch of interesting-looking villains. Everyone is acted credibly no matter how ridiculous they are forced to portray their wastelander. It’s a miracle of oddity, an adventure into the unknown, and something just akin enough to old Westerns that its new coat of paint still feels strangely comfortable. For a lot of the same reasons that Raiders of the Lost Ark felt like a comforting revitalization of an old favorite, The Road Warrior finds a way to similarly innovate enough to become its own sub-genre staple, despite its storied influences.

When push comes to shove and the team sets up their combat scenes, they make sure to step it up in every way from the ‘79 predecessor. Where that film was almost entirely one-on-one car chases, The Road Warrior really puts the “war” in warrior, not leaving a doubt that the scale is now infinitely larger but also much more dangerous. And that goes as much for the stunt performers as it does for the script’s many characters. Without the safety benefit of CGI, we watch here as a bunch of probably dumb, probably-underpaid stunt guys and gals jump across very fast-moving vehicles and scamper to very makeshift pieces of weaponry that look equally unsafe. Arrows and boomerangs fly, rickety oil rigs and a two-person gyrocopter buzz around, all threatening to fall apart and kill actors at any moment. You can see and hear the nuts and bolts deciding whether or not to come apart and it’s genuinely frightening and magnificent in equal measure. The film grain combines with the many layers of dust and chrome to paint a portrait of dirty, bloody, painful desperation that only increases in suspense as the movie approaches its kinetic, thrilling conclusion. The whirs of the engines combine with the screams and bodily fluids of memorable characters such as The Feral Kid, Pappagallo, Humungus, and more to deliver a show-stopping final duel to the death that rivals any other final duel of the ‘80s…a decade of capital-g Great final duels.

When everything settles, you’re left with a world you don’t want to leave as it’s so different from almost anything else you see in these movies--and effortlessly authentic. Despite the aforementioned influences of old Westerns and pulp sci-fi/adventures, it’s a union of brilliant, often mean-spirited choices that succeed in making something wholly without peer in terms of its one-of-a-kind atmosphere. Just incredible, and it contains one of my favorite endings in movie history as the fable of the road warrior comes to a satisfying, mythic conclusion.

9.5/10