Tom Hardy is the absolute best as a family man whose mind got warped by a TV viewing of The Wild One so he adopted a Brando voice/pose and formed a motorcycle club that provided a real good time for a group of empty-headed friends before it got too big for him to control. Jodie “The Last Duel” Comer is our entry point, being interviewed by Mike Faist (who has nothing to do here) about her relationship with Elvis Butler and the changing forms of the club.

Nichols’s dream project based on a photo book about the real club. Feels kinda flat, sorta what’s-the-point – if you’re going to make Rumble Fish then don’t hold back, just make Rumble Fish. At least it’s smart enough to cast The Bonnie Man as a bartender and to end strongly, and of course it’s better than Ferrari. Note that my options tonight were this Mike Faist movie where two sporting men who are deeply in love keep getting challenged, or Challengers.

some riders:
Michael Shannon, the director’s lucky charm
Damon Herriman (Charles Manson) as Hardy’s right-hand man
Emory Cohen (Brooklyn) wants to quit and become a cop
Toby Wallace (The Royal Hotel) shoots Hardy and takes over
Happy Anderson (The Standoff at Sparrow Creek) must have been the first challenger

other riders: Blueface from The Nice Guys, Karl Glusman of Noe’s Love, Boyd Holbrook of Dial of Destiny, and Norman Reedus of Cigarette Burns.

Matt Singer: “Fury Road is an incredible achievement, one that strains so hard at the leash of the possible that it eventually breaks free and barrels headlong into the realm of insane genius. … They’ll keep making car chase movies after Fury Road, but there’s really no need.”

I loved the movie, but was maybe not as bowled-over by its lunatic intensity because was prepped by reviews. What I wasn’t prepared for was the plot twist when the movie’s first-two-thirds nonstop car chase finally stops, and with nothing but salt wasteland in front of them, Max proposes The Worst Idea Of All Time, to drive straight back through the armies that they’d just escaped and attack the citadel.

Tasha Robinson:

These are some preposterously tough people, and yet they’re perpetually at the end of their rope, and yet they perpetually keep going. That’s a very fine emotional place to keep a film pitched to for two straight hours, but the action is so well choreographed, so solid and visceral, that it works fine.

Charlize Theron stars as Furiosa, her team of escaped wives including Zoe Kravitz (Angel in X-Men 4). Max is Tom Hardy (Locke), constantly being threatened and/or helped by “albino maniac” Nicholas Hoult (Beast in X-Men 4). The main gas-masked villain played someone called Toecutter in the original Mad Max, which I should really watch sometime.

The movie was so beloved that even Cinema Scope gives it their breathless Tony Scott treatment, explaining Miller’s filmmaking techniques to keep his action scenes visceral and legible at once. “Advances in data processing and motion capture are rendered moot by Fury Road‘s proof that a basis in reality still adds a sense of weight to the proceedings impossible to recreate artificially.”

EDIT JUNE 2017:

Watched again at home,
in beautiful black and chrome.

“We are not to blame.”
“Then who killed the world?”

EDIT OCT 2020:

Showed to dad… he liked it.

I just stared at Tom Hardy alone in a car for ninety minutes and I still wouldn’t recognize the guy if he knocked on the door right now to borrow a cup of sugar. He’s sort of a Jude Law/Edward Norton/Ewan McGregor type, I guess. Not that he wasn’t very good in his one-man show, driving from the suburbs toward London because a one-night-stand is having his baby, explaining along the way to his wife and his job, where he’s supposed to be working all night to prep for a huge construction project in the morning. The job wastes no time in firing him, but he walks his subordinate through all the needed steps, dealing with a couple of emergencies, taking breaks to comfort the pregnant woman he barely knows who is alone in a London hospital. Locke finds his wife and kids less easy to negotiate with, and she ultimately decides he won’t be welcome back. It’s a real-time journey, the second I’ve watched in just over a week, and during the rare times he’s not on the phone, he justifies himself to his dead father in the rearview mirror, who abandoned his mom before Locke was born then tried to come back into his adult life.

Kiarostami probably loves the script, a man alone in a car (I was just thinking of his Certified Copy while watching the Before movies, too). It must’ve been hell to figure out how to shoot and edit. Lots of bleary night-driving cinematography. You wonder how the filmmakers will keep us interested visually, but soon the actors take charge and never let go. Alongside Hardy (whom I’ve seen and not noticed in a few movies) there’s Andrew Scott (Moriarty in Sherlock) as the coworker taking over the big job (he’s very good, and a couple publications mistook the actor for Chris O’Dowd), Ruth Wilson (of The Prisoner Remake, she won a golden globe last week for The Affair) as Locke’s wife, Olivia Colman (Peep Show, Look Around You) as the woman having Locke’s baby, Ben Daniels (of Doom, haha, remember Doom?) as Locke’s now-former boss, and Alice Lowe (Andrew Scott’s My Life In Film costar, also in Darkplace) as a nurse. Steven Knight wrote Amazing Grace, but after a couple more like Locke I might forgive him for that.

A. Nayman: “Refreshingly, there’s no suggestion whatsoever that we’re watching an ‘everyman’ here, but rather a highly unique individual whose intelligence and resolve are liabilities when applied in the wrong direction.” Rosenbaum voted it one of the ten best of the year, calls it “a heroic, existential western that essentially focuses on the hero’s endurance in relation to a series of moral and practical challenges, which inevitably becomes a series of moral and practical challenges for the audience.” Dissolve: “a harrowingly focused portrayal of a man at risk of being defined by his greatest mistake. … Eventually, the highway is completely superimposed over Hardy’s face, conflating the road with the man driving on it until it’s no longer clear where he’s going, or who he might be when he gets there.”