MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

(George Miller, 2015)

One viewing of Mad Max: Fury Road won't be enough. There is too much detail, too much crammed into some of George Miller's frames for anybody to take in on first viewing.
This is what action cinema can do, Miller seems to be saying to the many hacks and charlatans who have come to dominate the genre since he made his last Mad Max film in 1985. This is what it can be. And what it can be is a relentless, absurdly beautiful steam train of narrative momentum, with no body fat, moments of incredible spectacle unlike anything in recent cinema, a minimum of exposition or dialogue, character who are defined by their actions, a streak of jet-black wit straight through the middle, and a grotesque edge which makes it almost queasily unforgettable.
Very loosely a sequel, the film picks up Max (Tom Hardy) wandering the post-apocalyptic wasteland, still traumatised by past losses, as he is chased down and captured by a band of white-painted War Boys (whose chant does recall the Duran Duran song "Wild Boys", the video of which was a straight Russell Mulcahy-helmed Mad Max: The Road Warrior rip-off). They take him back to the Citadel, run by Megaton Joe (Hugh Keys-Byrne), a tumorous old warlord kept alive by a breathing apparatus attached to his face, who maintains order by rationing the water he has drilled for underground, keeps a farm of wet nurses to supply mothers milk, grows crops and guarantees obedience from his legions of soldiers through the mythology he has concocted, a mix of suicide bomber Paradise talk and Viking beliefs ("Valhalla" crops up repeatedly) with modern notions and chrome spray-paint.
Max is used as a "blood-bag", reviving ailing War Boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult). Soon he is chained to the hood of a car and hunting down the rogue Furiosa (Charleze Theron) through the wastes as she makes a run for it  in her War Rig (a huge, customised lorry) with Megaton Joe's entire stable of young wives in tow. Soon enough she and Max have made an uneasy truce, both intent on survival, as hordes of Joe's warriors chase them on an armada of vehicles.
Perhaps 15-20 minutes of this film are made up of dialogue, spoken by characters who are not otherwise engaged in violence of one kind or another. The rest is all action. And Miller is a master of action, orchestrating immensely complex sequences featuring dozens of vehicles which are never remotely confusing or incoherent. The audience always knows what is at stake and who is where. Cars flip and explode, ram and jump, actors are flung and shot and catapulted, and you can feel it all, understand why it is happening and how it relates to everything else. This is a terribly rare quality in modern cinema, unfortunately, and it gives every action scene huge impact.
Even the relatively sparing use of cgi is effective - a dust storm early in the pursuit made me wince as it buffeted Max. A three-way fistfight is brilliantly done, reflecting character and personality just as much as it does the preferences of the fight co-ordinator.
Miraculously, none of these action scenes feel remotely pointless or ostentatious. They all advance the story or illustrate character. Just like every one of the thousands of details here, everything feels thought-out and organic.
The cast vanish into these roles. Hardy and Theron share first billing, and if he lacks something of Mel Gibson's raw and volatile star power in the role of Max, he is still magnetic and convincingly desperate and resourceful, and his physicality makes him believable in the action scenes. When he vanishes into the cobalt at night and returns with a blood-splattered face and a bag full of guns, you believe he's been capable of some awful violence. Theron has more of an arc and makes the most of it, making Furiosa a commanding warrior who craves escape. Hoult is almost as good as the War Boy who loses his faith, and the rest of the cast all fit beautifully into this bizarre, somewhat unhinged world, bringing its corners and edges to vivid life.
It looks and sounds amazing, too: cinematographer John Seale came out of retirement for this, and his work is exceptionally vibrant. This is probably the most beautiful action film ever made. Junkie XL's score is thunderous and exciting too.
But really, this is all about George Miller. Always a meter storyteller, at the age of 70 he has surpassed everybody else currently working at this sort of material with what may be the greatest film of his career. This is a glorious film.

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

(Bryan Singer, 2014)

With their thunder well and truly stolen by the Avengers franchise, the X-Men films reach a seventh instalment, needing a reinvigoration. So they return to basic principles: Bryan Singer, director of the first two films, returns, as does most of his cast, joining forces with the cast of the prequel X-Men: First Class to create an Epic, time-travel superhero story based on one of the most beloved stories from over 50 years of X-Men comics.
And Singer brings some quality back with him; this is the best X-Men film since X2, and feels the most closely related to the comics in the entire series, filled as it is with geek references and easter eggs, its ragged, messy plotting fusing a few outstanding set-pieces together by leaning on the familiarity of its strongest characters.
The plot kicks off decades in the future, when shape-shifting, seeming unbeatable robots known as sentinels have ravaged the earth, killing mutants or anybody whose genes might produce a mutant somewhere down the line. X-Men fight them in little bands. At this point, an elderly Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) come up with a plan to use the phasing power of Shadowcat (Ellen Page) to send the consciousness of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to drop into his younger body in the early 1970s, before the pivotal act which would kick off the sentinel programme can take place.
When he gets there, Wolverine must find the younger versions of the Professor (James McEvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) in order to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), creator of the sentinels. Along for the ride is Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and briefly - and thrillingly - Quicksilver (Evan Peters), whose slo-mo super-speed decimation of some security guards set to Jim Croce may be the best and wittiest action scene in this entire series.
The plot flits from New York to Paris to Washington, and from present to past to future, but Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg keep it all surprisingly comprehensible and the sheer amount of incident means that it never gets dull. Indeed, it fairly whips along without pause from the opening battle with sentinels to Wolverine's fight with Beast to the climactic cross-cutting of Magneto taking down the White House with a last stand in the future.
The fact that audiences know these characters so well helps immeasurably - the story just kicks in and rolls along without many introductions. The cast are probably a bit better than this material deserves; Fassbender and Lawrence, particularly, make their characters terrifyingly, believably intense. Exposition is nicely done, and Singer retains the ability to shoot big actions scenes stylishly. Oh, it can be terribly clunky, and the political and moral allegories of the first two films are now a distant memory, but as a blockbuster spectacle, X-Men: Days of Future Past succeeds splendidly.

JACK THE GIANT SLAYER

(Bryan Singer, 2013)

Perhaps the most irritating and pointless vogue in current cinema is the adaptation of fairytales into updated forms. Goth romances, horror stories, and worst of all; wannabe epic fantasy Lord of the Rings rips-offs.
Thats where we find Jack The Giant Slayer; turning Jack and the Beanstalk into a film full of battles and sieges and swords and rolling landscapes. As such, it's hard to say why it doesn't work. The script doesn't help; the characters are familiarly cliched types we've seen all too often, the situations mostly stale and similar to others from better films. The tone is odd - lying somewhere in that zone between family film and gritty adventure film but never quite sure of which it really wants to be, this is a film where giants bite human heads off, but we never see any blood. The humour is juvenile, ensuring we know these giants are flatulent snot-eating slobs, yet the emotional arcs are adolescent, with a hero and heroine (Nicholas Hoult and Eleanor Tomlinson, both pretty and utterly boring) who virtually fall in love at first sight, both yearning for escape and adventure, neither evincing much personality.
The effects are impressive, with most of the Giant sequences suitably frightening and awesome, and I can well believe that Singer wanted to make this film just so he could put together scenes like the one where we first glimpse a giant or the one where they rampage across a plain towards a city. Its well designed - if, again, a little too familiar in conception with its gritty grimy medieval look - and well-made, with nice photography by the reliable Newton Thomas Siegel, and the story rattles along.
But its really not enough.
It fades from the mind almost as you watch it, and it makes you wonder why Singer's career has started to drift in quite the way it has.