Furiosa is more of a Wasteland than it wants to be
Almost a decade after Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller is back for more vehicular mayhem. Elsewhere, we've got Garfield and The Strangers, but which is more horrifying?
All of this week’s big reviews are present and correct, as well as a few words on the weird and controversial buzz around several films at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
George Miller gets Fast and Furiosa
One of the many joys of Mad Max: Fury Road was that it never stood still for long enough to think about whether anyone could earnestly look at a baby girl and give them the name Furiosa. It’s a really cool name for your battle-hardened badass at the helm of a vehicle called the War Rig, but not the ideal moniker for a little girl frolicking through foliage. I thought about this a lot during the first hour of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and that’s very much where the problems started.
Returning director George Miller makes the bold suggestion here that the reason everyone from audiences to critics to the Oscars fell in love with Fury Road was not because of its astonishing action, but because of its lore and mythology. Furiosa is a movie entirely in love with the notion of filling in the encyclopaedia of the Wasteland, abandoning the white-knuckle tension and acrid exhaust smoke for wordy power struggles and pretentious chapter headings (a cinematic bugbear of mine).
We follow the young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) as she is seized from the feminine utopia of the Green Place by footsoldiers of the unhinged warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Soon, Dementus has made a deal with returning villain Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) that sees Furiosa added to his harem of wives. Understandably not keen on this fate, she escapes and conceals herself within his Citadel as a mute male mechanic for around a decade, in which she becomes Anya Taylor-Joy.
What I’ve just run through in a paragraph takes the film over an hour and, in contrast to the beautiful economy of Fury Road, it’s a patience-tester. The politics of the Wasteland have always been much less important than the characters’ penchant for twisted metal. No one ever questioned why the Doof Warrior was there with his flaming guitar; we just thought it was cool.
But the deepening of Furiosa’s character does briefly work during the film’s middle segment in which she’s paired up with War Rig driver Praetorian Jack. Played brilliantly by Tom Burke, Jack is the most human character in the history of the Mad Max franchise and proves to be a textured and intriguing counterpoint to Furiosa’s single-minded quest for vengeance.
This particularly comes to the fore in Furiosa’s most impressive sequence — a chaotic surprise attack on the War Rig that took 78 days to film and is the only time this movie comes close to reconnecting with the intensity of Fury Road. Amid all of the joyously choreographed bloodshed, there’s a palpable sense of wordless chemistry building between two people who didn’t know each other at all before they were forced to fight for their lives at each other’s sides.
Unfortunately, Miller is less interested in Jack than he is in Chris Hemsworth hamming it up behind a ludicrous prosthetic nose. It’s not clear how Dementus has achieved the level of status in the Wasteland that he has given his obvious stupidity, with all of his intelligent decisions being made off-screen. On-screen, he’s too much of a cartoon to ever be genuinely scary or even hateable, despite his many despicable acts.
It’s damning really that the follow-up to one of the most energetic and muscular movies of the last decade feels so thoroughly lacking on the spectacle front. Even the action that does take place seems to have an extra notch of CGI sheen than last time, though there’s fun to be had in the over-saturated colours that give it the feel of being ripped from the pages of a comic book.
Taylor-Joy does what she can with the taciturn crumbs of Furiosa, though she’s ultimately crowded out of her own movie by the sheer amount of ponderous narrative furniture. Charlize Theron actually got more to do in terms of depth, despite the fact her Furiosa was nominally a supporting character.
I’m wary of falling into the trap of criticising Furiosa for the film that it isn’t rather than the film that it is. It’s true that being different and less action-focused than Fury Road isn’t automatically a bad thing. However, there’s a sense throughout the movie of a throttle left deliberately unfloored, not least in the bizarrely talky and structurally weird damp squib of an ending.
This is a film that palpably wants to provide carnage, populated by characters who constantly tell us how unhinged they are. And yet, the film never erupts. At times, it barely even simmers. There’s an enormous, hungry V8 lurking beneath the hood of Furiosa, but Miller never gives it the guzzoline it really needs to die historic on the Fury Road.
There’s no Max this time, and that’s not a problem. But it definitely could’ve done with being a lot madder.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in UK cinemas now.
This cat is a right Pratt
Garfield loves lasagne and hates Mondays. I love good animated films and hate every second I spent watching The Garfield Movie. In fact, anyone who has ever tried to argue in defence of great family animated films should hate The Garfield Movie. When people try to say that all family fare is lazy, undemanding slop for kids, this is exactly the sort of unpolished turd they’re talking about.
The weird thing here is that The Garfield Movie has no reason to be about Garfield at all. Other than running gags about how much he likes to eat, there’s nothing that identifies this character as the cat with a 50-year comic strip pedigree. And by casting Chris Pratt to provide his voice, they’ve ensured he also sounds like every single animated character of the last few years.
After speeding through Garfield’s origin tale, the movie abandons his human pal from the source material for his estranged father (Samuel L Jackson) and a heist plot to shake malevolent Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) off his back. That’s it. That’s all there is in terms of story. If you’ve ever seen an estranged father story before, you’ve already seen every beat of this — and the heist has nothing to it either. Ocean’s Eleven, this ain’t.
But films like this aren’t always about the plot. They’re about having fun in an animated world with an engaging lead character. Unfortunately, The Garfield Movie doesn’t have a leg to stand on there either. Sometimes, Garfield will look down the camera lens and Pratt will speak with the inflection and gratingly snarky tone of a joke, but the words don’t even seem like an attempt at comedy. Often, he’s just saying the names of cultural references like a feline Peter Kay.
It’s hard to think of a more dispiriting attempt to cash in on a well-known character in recent years. This is a movie with three credited screenwriters — one for each joke perhaps? — and a complete void where its heart should be. In its place is just an ultra-smooth CG cat raising his ultra-smooth CG eyebrow at the camera. It’s enough to make you never want to eat a lasagne again.
The Garfield Movie is in UK cinemas now.
Home is where the horror is
Bryan Bertino’s 2008 slasher The Strangers was a nasty little shot in the arm for the genre. He returned a decade later to co-write a cine-literate sequel Prey at Night, which drowned itself in homages to better slasher movies of the 1980s — as well as the neon-hued work of Adam Wingard in films like The Guest. Now, the slate has been wiped clean by genre veteran Renny Harlin, who is directing a new trilogy — starting with The Strangers: Chapter 1.
The setup is very familiar. Young couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) end up stranded in a small Oregon town by car trouble, directed to stay in the nearby Airbnb — referred to as an “internet house” by a less than web-savvy local — for the night. Of course, they’re soon targeted by three masked assailants, motivated to stalk, attack, and carve them up them just “because you’re here”.
Just as Unforgiven triggered a rethink in the Western genre and Scream forced slashers to be cleverer, you’d think that 2012’s subversive masterpiece The Cabin in the Woods would’ve brought about some sort of sea-change in secluded woodland horror. On the strength of this movie, though, Harlin and writers Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland — Bertino has a “story by” credit — are very comfortable in replicating the same tropes we’ve seen taken apart elsewhere.
Actually, the film’s on safer ground before the really bad stuff starts happening. Harlin takes his time and does a decent job of gently amping up the tension, separating the lead characters and providing plenty of masked reflections and mysterious noises to get the adrenaline flowing. It’s not ground-breaking stuff, but it still works. Just about.
Things are a lot less sure-footed when the things that go bump in the night start bumping. It’s a disappointingly generic hour of what Nigel Floyd once memorably called “cattle prod cinema”, relying entirely on that tedious old quiet-quiet-BANG-quiet loop. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that most of the big “scares” have been on hard rotation in cinemas for months as part of the trailer.
There’s ultimately just an emptiness to the whole thing. By definition, there’s not much depth to the Strangers movies — they’re deliberately framed as random, motive-free attacks — but there’s nothing here to fill the gap. The scares aren’t scary, the gore isn’t especially nasty, and there’s very little reason for us to care about the two people running around screaming.
This is supposed to fire the starting pistol for a trilogy and my charitable side wonders if this one is generic and trope-y by design, just to set the stage for more intriguing and original stories to come. But will anybody else care?
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is in UK cinemas now.
Is festival hype actually helpful?
Much of the movie industry has decamped to France for the last few weeks, celebrating the 2024 edition of the Cannes Film Festival. This has given us some very buzzy premieres, including Francis Ford Coppola’s already infamous Megalopolis, Kevin Costner’s epic Western tale Horizon, and David Cronenberg’s new horror The Shrouds. But all three of those films have been battered as heavily as they’ve been praised.
Megalopolis has dominated movie discourse in recent weeks, and there’s no denying that the film has a lot more name recognition off the back of its poorly-received Cannes premiere. It’ll be a figure of intrigue when it finally gets a release, though it might be more as a “bad movie” curio than the life’s work of a cinematic maestro.
Ali Abbasi’s most mainstream movie to date, The Apprentice, has also won itself some headlines. Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump in the button-pushing drama, which has got some mixed reviews, but has also drawn the attention of the once and perhaps future president. True to form, he’s calling for legal action.
In all of these cases, the response to the films has been somewhat mixed. And by the time we actually get to see the movies, it’s entirely possible that any positivity around them will have been forgotten — with just the controversy remaining.
For my money, though, this year’s Cannes has increased the excitement I already had for two exciting movies. Having become a little obsessed with Poor Things, I cannot wait to see what Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone have cooked up with Kinds of Kindness — especially with Cannes reviewers comparing it to Lanthimos’ earlier, more confrontational work.
I’m also ecstatic with anticipation for Coralie Fargeat’s starry body horror The Substance off the back of its Cannes premiere. Her previous film — the rape-revenge thriller Revenge — was one of my favourite movies of the year it came out and I am delighted to see that her new film seems likely to win her plenty more fans in the English-speaking world.
Festival hype definitely cuts both ways. But now the torture of the wait begins, with some of these movies months and possibly even years away from getting a general release.
Trailer of the Week: Longlegs
I’ve already said in this segment of the newsletter how much I’ve enjoyed the breadcrumb trail of marketing for the upcoming mystery-horror Longlegs. We now have a full trailer, but the enigma and intrigue around Osgood Perkins’ story has been elegantly kept in place. Maika Monroe’s FBI agent is a little more fleshed out now, but the team at Neon are wisely keeping Nicolas Cage at arm’s length. His voice alone is enough to showcase just how scary this performance is going to be.
Longlegs doesn’t have a UK release date yet.
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Next week: The two biggest fears of modern times — AI and really massive spiders — take centre stage.