Mad Max, ranked

Forget the Italian post-nuke ripoffs, let's talk about the originals

If you can find a more exciting series of action movies I’d like to know about them. Often imitated, never duplicated, George Miller’s signature film series about the indomitable will of one man hurtling through the outback with a singular mind to survive is mankind’s crowning achievement in the world of action movies. Nobody does it better and as he gets older, Miller still manages to prove to the world that he can’t be caught and he will not be outdone.

I was fascinated by post-nuke movies when I was a kid. Growing up in the 80’s, nuclear war was a very real threat on the horizon and we all lived through it, resigned to our fates. Post-nuke movies made cartoons out of our fears and planted a seed in our minds that somehow we could overcome the end of the world and survive but most of these movies were absolute garbage. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I really didn’t care for Eliminators of the Year 3000 or The New Barbarians. I had seen the original Mad Max movies on TV and could see the difference between George Miller’s singular vision for a grim tomorrow up against the casual indifference to the source material that otherwise great Italian filmmakers like Enzo G. Castellari had for their cheesy ripoffs. The choice was clear to me.

But not all Mad Max movies are the same and some are better than others. So here’s my ranking for the four Mad Max movies available at the time of this writing.

4. Beyond Thunderdome

Mad Max has always been about roaring engines and feral maniacs driving around the dusty outback in custom vehicles. From the first movie, to its sequel, to the revival, fetishistic photography of cars is central to the appeal. I understand that as a filmmaker so closely associated to the property, George Miller very likely want to try something different and see what kinds of other stories he could tell about Max, but the brand being so tightly attached to high speed car chases and the struggle for guzzoline that taking him out of that scenario felt weird. There are also some characters that leave fans scratching their heads. Once again, Bruce Spence shows up as a gyrocopter pilot but as it turns out he’s not the gyrocopter pilot from The Road Warrior. He’s another gyrocopter pilot who happens to look exactly like the guy in the last movie. For years I simply assumed that in spite of The Road Warrior’s ending, that this pilot and that pilot were the same guy and that the kid in Thunderdome was the feral child from The Road Warrior with a few years behind him and a mentor that taught him to speak. Beyond Thunderdome isn’t a bad movie, by any stretch, but with three other out-and-out bangers to consider, its natural place in the order is at the bottom of the list.

The cast is a killer, though. This was the age of peak-Tina Turner. A year prior to the release of Thunderdome, she released Private Dancer and staged one of the greatest career comebacks of all time. In Thunderdome she plays one of the central antagonists, Auntie Entity, but what makes her such a memorable character and one of the movie’s saving graces are the nuances that set her apart from the savage beasts of other Mad Max movies. Humungous and Toecutter both have these strange spoken qualities about the way that they conduct themselves but at the end of the day they’re savage marauders. Auntie Entity, on the other hand, is someone with a genuine desire to maintain order in a lawless time and drive the wasteland survivors toward a future where they’re not out there cutting each other’s throats for a cup full of gas. If the movie didn’t shift directions in the middle and move away from her, entirely, you could make a solid argument that her drive toward keeping a lock on Bartertown is what the movie is actually about.

3. Mad Max

With all the crazy car chases, crashes, and wipeout stunts it’s really easy to forget what a weird movie Mad Max is. For starters, Max’s son is named Sprog and his leather-daddy boss at the Main Force Patrol is a man in a fancy neckerchief and leather pants named Fifi. What became clear to me as I rewatched Mad Max recently for this very article, a quality of the movie that I had never previously noticed is that George Miller was very clearly aping A Clockwork Orange in his brutalist dystopian neo-western. There’s even a sign for a milk bar in the town that the Toecutter’s gang stops at when they pick up The Nightrider’s body. The Toecutter, himself, seems to be a nod to Alex DeLarge with one eyebrow shaved off, as opposed to Alex’s one false eyelash. And this is to say nothing of his measured, intellectual way of speaking. Even The Hall of Justice, where the Main Force Patrol operates from and criminals are released by flaccid court justice, appears to be nothing more than a bombed out abandoned factory building.

Mad Max, the movie that started it all, the movie that launched a thousand ripoffs, ends up further down the list than I would liked to have seen and I do place it at a distant third, due to the entire picture being quite messy. It’s a taste of things to come, for sure. Up to that point there hadn’t been a movie like it. There would be a million imitators after but Miller’s vision for the near future looked like nothing else. It was the introduction to the world of the gonzo Australian movie machine. It was somehow louder and more crass than anything made in America with an approach to stunts that communicates a casual contempt for safety in pursuit of excitement that begs the question, “Did that stuntman actually die?”

2. The Road Warrior

With one Mad Max picture under the hood and a genuine hit on his hands, Miller went back to the well a couple of years later to make the movie that I think he intended to make in the first place. And yes, I know that for the rest of the world it’s known as Mad Max 2, but I’ve always liked the American title better. With only one more movie in the franchise to go, it’s pretty obvious which one takes the belt, but by all means, I mean to make this clear: The battle between The Road Warrior and Fury Road couldn’t be any closer. There is a single hair of separation between these two and The Road Warrior barely loses out in the end.

The increased budget and support of a Hollywood studio behind him allowed him to let his mind run absolutely wild and the movie that we got from this elevation is an 8-cylinder version of a Kurosawa movie. Max is recolored as a moody Clint Eastwood/Toshiro Mifune type and once again, he faces off against an articulate villain at the head of a vast posse of violent desert weirdos. Setting aside his mastery of action, Miller’s villains are always great and The Humungous is easily his best. Miller gives you nothing about his background but presents a visually arresting bad guy in fetish leather and a steel hockey mask. His nearly-hairless head pulses under the scalp and his eyes are black from lid to lid. So much is suggested and so little is explained and that’s fine. In the same ways that John Carpenter suggested the world outside the prison in Escape From New York, Lord Humungous provides fuel for the imagination in coming to understand the world that Max lives in.

We also get a much tighter script. Mad Max is a terribly sloppy movie saved by the director’s vision and Australia’s dedication to being the world’s greatest stunt movie destination, but The Road Warrior comes along and keeps all of the previous movie’s saving graces and compounds it with a lean, mean excitement machine. You love the villain. You love the hero. The big finale chase scene is white knuckle enthusiasm from start to finish. The Road Warrior is a nearly-perfect action movie.

1. Fury Road

I feel like I’m cheating a bit with this one. Max has always been at the center of any given Mad Max movie. I mean, it’s in the name. But for all of his presence in Fury Road, this one is really more about Furiosa. She’s easily the more compelling character of the movie and Max is merely along for the ride. It calmly sails to the top of this list, though. In the age of visual effects, they literally don’t make them like this anymore. Car chase movies are expensive and dangerous. Drivers and stuntmen get hurt, cars end up wrecked before you intend for them to be. It’s an insurance nightmare and budget overruns loom largely in the back of everyone’s mind. It’s so much cheaper and easier to set up the shots in a computer and most people aren’t going to notice or care. But for those of us who grew up in the age of practical effects, nothing beats the thrill of physical stunts, real car crashes, and gouts of actual flame on the scale of a movie like Fury Road. It’s hard to get excited like that for CGI because even though it may look photorealistic, it’s still lodged in your consciousness as a theoretical digital special effect. Visual effects are an art form, make no mistake, but if your movie aims to thrill and excite, you’re going to get a lot more mileage out of having real stuntmen leap from real cars onto other real cars while said real cars and the camera truck are hurtling through the desert at obscene speeds, spitting in the eyes of fate.

Fury Road is a movie that should not exist. It is a movie that cannot be made in this modern age. It must have had kept studio execs up at night, having seen the dailies, waiting for news that one of Miller’s cast or stunt performers had gone under the wheels. Fury Road is overwhelming. I caught it on opening night at the late show and ended up driving home in silence, too raw from the audio-visual pummeling I’d just received to even listen to a podcast. The entire movie is like the Normandy invasion scene in Saving Private Ryan. It’s a disorienting nightmare of noise and flame. Even in the storied history of the Mad Max franchise, well-known for its unique production design and desert aesthetic, Fury Road stands apart as the undisputed heavyweight champ. When you think that Miller couldn’t possibly turn up the volume any more than he did with The Road Warrior, he comes along with Fury Road to let you know that yes, there was still plenty of decibels to deliver. The decades-long gap between Thunderdome and Fury Road gave Miller a very, very long time to ruminate and pump new blood into a franchise that I was fairly sure the world was done with but the return gave me hope for the future of action film. Fury Road is packed to rafters with gnarly bad guys and ghoulish soldiers. The wild stunt performances of Mad Max movies past are cranked to nail-biting intensity like never before. Stuntmen dangle perilously from the hoods of cars, mere inches from the ground. They leap from one car to the next, vaulting from poles that wave wildly from side to side. The only impression you’re left with is that these actors are unaffected by fear. It’s amazing!