Mad Max

It's sometimes amazing how much can be done on a budget that can conveniently be measured in pennies. Mad Max is one such case. This is a raw, elemental, strange, and unpredictable action picture that begins as a cops vs. street punks movie, and transforms into a revenge picture of surprising power. Mel Gibson plays Max, a cop facing a vicious gang of street thugs on the long and desolate roads of the Australian outback. The story begins with Max as a contented man, secure in his job and happy with his family. But after the gang robs him of both his partner and his wife, Max sets out to even the score.

The chase sequences in Mad Max are the movie's highlights, and the level of excitement George Miller manages to extract from his limited resources is impressive. Watch the chase sequence. Miller never lets us lose sight of who's chasing whom, and clues us in on the strategies of the players. This allows us to feel as if we're participating in the action instead of merely observing it. Michael Bay has had budgets many orders of magnitude higher than Miller had in Mad Max, but he's never achieved 1/10th as much.

This movie was dubbed into Mid-Atlantic English for the U.S. market, but I can't imagine it in any accent other than Australian. American accents just don't fit this bizarre landscape and these equally bizarre denizens of the landscape. While my memories of many U.S. action films tend to run together, it'll be hard for me to forget what made Mad Max so different.