Mad Max III--Beyond Thunderdome

Mel Gibson, in Jesus Christ long locks, plays Max as Messiah in this, the third of the series that we all know and love. The look stays around just long enough to achieve the desired effect, then there is a convenient excuse to lop them off, so that Mel may carry on with his "sexiest man alive" good looks, unencumbered by the unruly mop, which looked strangely fake to begin with. That’s just the sort of artifice which can sink a movie, but in this case almost anything can be forgiven. Here at last is a movie with guts (like the first two, I guess, but especially “The Road Warrior”), not afraid to do its thing and screw you if you don’t like it. This movie does not attempt to cater to imbecile 14-year-olds or disenchanted Yuppies. It just wants to jump right off the screen into your face, and it does.

The picture has a strange beauty all its own, and even though the plot gets a little muddled, and the narrative drive seems to falter, you have to admire the vividness of the post-Apocalyptic world in which it takes place. The craft that went into creating this world on screen is really something, and in that way, it improves upon the first two Maxes, which never really gave us much of a sense of the place, as opposed to merely the setting. This futuristic nightmare world rivals that created in, say, “A Clockwork Orange,” and Bartertown (one of the main locations) is as fully realized as the best that the “Star Wars” saga had to offer. You really feel like you are there. The Thunderdome itself is a nightmare classic, sort of a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” meets “Deathrace 2000.” What’s more, a mordant wit invests the whole picture, or at least a good portion of it; it is surprisingly funny at times.

The names are great and memorable, like Auntie Entity (Tina Turner, who disappointed me by never being all that commanding of a presence, even in her big scenes), and Master Blaster, actually two beings who operate as a unit: Master the brain, and Blaster the enforcer body. Good stuff. The language they’ve created for the world fits beautifully; it reminds me of Burgess’s for “Clockwork,” or perhaps Newspeak. It is a mixed-up junkyard of a language, with scraps of pop culturisms combined with Archie Bunker-like malapropisms, all forming a strangely utilitarian tongue which is at once foreign and comprehensible. Nicely done.

It is a shame that the picture cannot sustain the drive with which it opened. As I said, the narrative flow just crumbles; you can tell by the increasingly frequent use of blackouts to end scenes. They fade to black and then just cut to another scene. That’s a perfectly legitimate device, but when you do it this much it suggests a problem with continuity. The picture takes a turn which starts to look like James Bond in post-nuclear Australia, and things go slightly haywire, to the point where at times you cannot tell quite what is happening or why, and the significance of certain characters (who seem to be significant) is never made clear. They even crap out on the reuniting of Max and the Gyro Pilot (after they set it up!) unless I am missing the whole point, which is always a possibility.

So you sit there and note all this, and then you don’t worry about it, because you can watch the stunts. Ah the stunts! Incredible. I mean, further variations on ones we’ve seen in the past, but carried off with such skill, such orgiastic self-absorption, that I actually started to laugh a couple of times, even as I was riveted to my seat. After a while they become the point of the movie, but that’s OK. We really don’t look to Max for philosophical insight, despite the Messiah overtones here. He really is a Messiah to one tribe in the picture; he sort of saves them from themselves, before sacrificing himself (not dying, however, so there can be a MM IV) for the greater good (a la “Road Warrior”) and walking off into the sunset, alone (although still apparently lacking in insight, even if he is a bit more humanitarian here). He is The Man With no Name, which is how he is referred to at one point.

George Miller shares not only writing credit but also directing credit (with a different person) which puzzled me a bit, and I cannot help but wonder if that may account in part for the discombobulation of the movie. But what the hell; there’s good guys and bad guys, a self-sufficient Youth, evildoers who look like offspring of The Humungous, those great Maxian costumes, and action! Action! Action!

An odd note—at one point one of the “significant/insignificant” characters says, “no matter where you go, there you are,” which is a direct quote from the horrendo “Buckaroo Banzai” (previously ripped in this column). Why that line? Why that movie? Bad choice for inspiration, if that’s what it is. Discordant notes like that mix me up every time. If they could just focus a little more, things would be much better. As it is, things are pretty good; it’s hard not to enjoy this, particularly if you like seeing leather-clad behemoths fly through the air. I know I do.