Deborah Lipp

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) 7/10
Society has broken down due to war. In the “Waste Lands” of Australia, savage gangs kill one another for gasoline. Mad Max (Mel Gibson) wanders this region and encounters a heavily guarded compound with abundant gasoline. Against his better judgment, he helps them against a brutal gang out to kill them all.

I should have taken my friend’s advice and skipped Mad Max. The Road Warrior stands alone as a low budget marvel.

What works about The Road Warrior? Well, that it’s a virtual remake of Shane doesn’t hurt. The action, especially the driving, is considerably better than in its predecessor, the point-of-view camera has more immediacy, at least to these untutored eyes. The world of The Road Warrior is successfully self-contained. You get a sense of what this life is, of who these people are; and because everything is so exaggerated, the brutes so brutal, the sets and costumes so bizarre, the feeling that this is a whole, is absolutely necessary to making the story work. Now that I’ve seen it, I see that this is exactly where Mad Max failed for me; it was just a linear progression from one scene of driving to the next scene of violence to the next scene of misogyny, without any real overarching structure.

There’s great stuff in this movie. The feral kid, the trained snakes, the survivalist community, the mad gang, all of these are far more interesting than Max himself (which is typical of Gibson’s career ever since).

There’s a very interesting sort of homophobia in this movie, wherein all the bad guys (they seem all to be male) display blatant homoeroticism (the most loving relationship we see is between a male couple in the attacking gang). The good guys, on the other hand, have women in strong positions, and form heterosexual relationships. You can’t help but notice the bad gay bikers in leather versus the good straight people in white clothing. I suppose it’s part of the “madness.”

It’s hard to know how to fit a movie like The Road Warrior into a rating system. On a scale that includes only cheesy low-budget movies of questionable taste, it’s clearly a ten. Should I subtract for cheese? I mean, not on pizza, but otherwise? As I’ve said, The Road Warrior is self-contained. That’s what makes it work, but that’s also what makes it stupid if you step outside of it. The acting is bad, but then, little acting is required, so does it matter? Ultimately, I went with the seven, because a seven is still a recommendation. This is the sort of earth-shaking question that keeps Roger Ebert up at night.