Anya Taylor-Joy, Tom Burke, Chris Hemswoth
FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA” My rating: B (Max)
148 minutes | MPAA rating: R
For millions of Marvel geeks around the globe Chris Hemsworth will always be Thor, superhero/god/party animal.
His best performance, though, may very well be as the heavy in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.”
In this prequel to “Mad Max: Fury Road” Helmsworth plays Dementus, the latest in a long line of desert-roving barbarian gangster-kings who for four decades have populated writer/director George Miller’s post-apocalyptic landscape.
The difference is that Helmsworth’s Dementus — while just as brutal as any of these other troglodytes — seems to have been a PhD candidate before the collapse of civilization.
He’s witty. Erudite. Appreciates irony and sarcasm.
In short, he’s a hoot.
Of course, “Furiosa” isn’t really his story. As played by Charlize Theron in “Fury Road,” Furiosa was a sort of female trucker/gladiator with one metal arm, a shaved head and a feminist’s disdain for the testosterone-fueled circumstances in which she finds herself. This latest film chronicles her early years.
It begins with Furiosa as a young girl (Alyla Browne) living in a rare green paradise. She’s kidnapped by marauders led by the muscled Dementus; when her mother is savagely executed after a failed rescue attempt, the girl starts laying plans for revenge.
It’ll take 20 years and the first hour of the movie before the role is taken over by Anya Taylor-Joy, who is given almost no dialogue but gets a lot out of her androgynous slow burn.
To be honest, I found the first 20 or so minutes of “Furious” to be a bit sub-standard. The crude, one-dimensional villains are interchangeable; even the stunt work and special effects struck me as unconvincing.
But after a while things improve (or I finally clicked into the movie’s wavelength) and “Furiosa” comes to life with several extended action sequences that’ll have viewers rubbing their eyes in disbelief.
Several characters from “Furiosa” appear here in slightly younger incarnations (they’ve got great names like Fang, Smeg, Scrotus and Rictus); new to the scene is Tom Burke as Praetorian Jack, a leather-clad teamster who teaches our heroine how to drive those iconic big rigs.
“Furiosa” is a very elaborate revenge melodrama. But it’s done with such visual and, surprisingly, verbal aplomb that I could happily watch it again.
Kevin Costner
“HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA – CHAPTER 1” My rating: B- (Max)
181 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Only weeks after it flopped at the box office, the first of Kevin Costner’s four “Horizon” films is streaming. It’s not bad.
Which isn’t to say it’s good. Not yet, anyway.
Watching Part I of “Horizon” is like reading the first few chapters of a novel and then losing your copy. It introduces characters and sets up potential developments…but feels scattershot and incomplete.
May I suggest that it never should have been planned as a theatrical release, that it would be much better served (and easier to digest) as 12 one-hour episodes on some streaming service?
Well, here’s what we’ve got so far.
The Horizon of the title is a town in Arizona. As the film begins in the late 1850’s a surveyor and his family are laying out the parameters of their proposed burg. The local Apaches have other ideas.
Indeed the action highlight is a nighttime raid on Horizon — little more than a collection of tents — that leaves all but a handful of settlers dead and scalped.
One of the few survivors is the newly widowed Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller), who after the raid must be dug out of a collapsed escape tunnel from her family’s cabin. Her rescuer is Lt. Trent Gephart of the U.S. Cavalry (Sam Worthington); a romance may be in the works.
Another plot thread: Old hand Hayes Ellison (Costner) finds himself protecting a young prostitute (Abbey Lee) and an infant who are being sought by the child’s murderous stepbrothers (Jon Beavers, Jamie Campbell Bower).
Meanwhile a wagon train wends its way across the prairie, with the wagon master (Luke Wilson) frustrated by a young woman from the East (Ella Hunt) whose entitled attitude threatens the survival of the entire party.
A teenage boy who lived through the opening massacre (Hayes Costner, the director’s son) ends up riding with a seedy bunch of scalp hunters led by a scuzzy killer (Jeff Fahey). Their M.O. is to raid Indian villages while the warriors are off on hunts; each scalp can be redeemed for cash.
Finally, we spend some time with Apaches warriors (Owen Crow Shoe, Tatanka Means) who disagree on how to deal with the white tide breaking over their lands.
That’s a lot of narrative elements, none of which come close to being resolved in this initial three-hour movie. New characters are introduced with head-spinning regularity (Jena Malone, Danny Huston, Will Patton, James Russo); we barely get to know any of them.
This means what while “Horizon” is crammed with visual wonders (the cinematographer is J. Michael Muro) it has very little feeling beyond the terror of an unpleasant death.
Only a couple of times does the script (by Costner, John Baird and Mark Kasden) strike a satisfying emotional note. One of these is delivered by Michael Rooker, the heavy of countless movies and T.V. shows, who has a brief, quietly heartbreaking moment as a crusty-but-kind Army sergeant recounting the death of one of his offspring.
As director, Costner gives us many a pretty picture but not a lot of narrative coherence. He borrows freely from the John Ford playbook — there’s a community dance (a staple of just about every Ford Western), an army outpost and dozens of flat-topped mesas that evoke the Monument Valley outcrops so iconic from “The Searchers” and other titles.
But there is simultaneously too much story here…and not enough.
At this point Costner has already finished the second film and is working on the other two. Indeed, “Horizon – Part I” ends with five minutes of scenes from the upcoming installments.
I’m looking forward to seeing them in quick succession. Perhaps then Costner’s master plan will become clear.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 