"Furiosa" Sprawls Out Into a Messy Spectacle

It's too much a prequel puzzle-piece that tries to fit into its predecessor, "Mad Max: Fury Road"

The question no one has been asking has been answered: “Do we need another Mad Max movie?”

The answer is “no we did not,” though veteran Australian director George Miller, also a medical doctor, seems to grow more barbarically visionary as he grows older.

That barbaric vision impresses on the big-screen in the fifth Mad-Max-inspired film, “Furiosa,” a prequel to “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the critical darling from 2015.

And also, as “Furiosa” is, it’s an inadvertent PSA for why civilized people everywhere have built walls.

Actually all Mad Max movies are, weirdly, sort of base-conservative. Contrary to the current Pope’s view that all humans are basically good, these movies believe that most people, at least in Australia, will turn into savage maniacs in hard times.

So everyone, as Furiosa does, should learn to shoot a gun well. They should also erect strong walls. Those could keep the roving lunatic biker gangs out, the kind that spray-paint their faces and turn their victims into human blood sausages.

And that’s about the nicest thing that these gangs do in “Furiosa.” In the beginning, they kidnap her at age 10 from her forest-utopia in the Outback, then they torture and kill her mother who attempts a solo rescue.

For the rest of the film, Furiosa herself — genetically desirable to breed children with, but too tough to be abused by any ripped 300-pound freak — gets stuck between two of the nastiest wasteland villains. These are Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth with a prosthetic nose, and Immortan Joe.

Dementus would attack and assault Valhalla, Joe’s towering tech-paradise in the wastes. But he and Joe strike an odd peace deal. So Dementus gives Furiosa to Joe, and yet she promptly escapes into Valhalla and hides out as a boy.

Fast-forward almost two decades and she has turned into Anya Taylor-Joy, a little sprite who can do great things more courageously than the most manly-looking wastelander. “Furiosa” works out how she herself learns to drive a big rig, how she loses her right arm, and why she’d rebel against Valhalla.

This sprawling mess of a film really is trying to land precisely into “Fury Road.” It’s based on a lengthy writeup to Furiosa’s character in that initial film, and it feels as if the writers had few connecting threads to bring together 18 years’ worth of Furiosa’s story and the five-part script that they came up with.

The movie offers a kidnapping rescue attempt, then a city-siege and assault, then a big rig chase, then a Bildungsroman for Furiosa, then a desert escape, and then more, and then more. At first, it tries to make Dementus into a warped Moses, leading his people into a promised land, only to abandon that idea halfway through, probably because of, um, its political sensitivities.

So I think “Furiosa’s” main through-thread is Furiosa’s vain hope that she will somehow reclaim her childhood. Maybe that means getting revenge on Dementus. Maybe that even means finding her way back to her childhood home, the directions of which are tattooed on her left arm.

No matter what, anybody who has seen “Fury Road” knows exactly where this movie is going.

That leaves all of the artistic surprises to the costumes, sets, and action sequences. Miller’s ability to “wow” hasn’t stopped at age 79. He does top “Fury Road” in a couple of five-minute big-rig chases. This is the most Cecil B. DeMille kind of flick I’ve seen in a long time.

But “Furiosa” is also far more a human drama about people stuck in an impossible place, with seemingly no hope. Here, a small female thrives doing tough-guy tasks in perhaps the most perversely masculine world ever put on film.

Nobody has ever liked those perversely masculine types. I mean the Sumerians built the Amorite Wall, a hundred miles long, ostensibly to keep people like this out. They didn’t succeed. Neither, as we know, does Immortan Joe.

Whoever those ancient peoples were, whom the Sumerians were trying ridiculously hard to keep out, this movie was made about and for them.