Film Review - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the newest entry in the Mad Max series and George Miller is once again in the directors chair but this Furiosa story is a prequel to the 2015 entry Fury Road and sees a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne and then Anya-Taylor Joy) kidnapped from her home in the Green Place to be the prisoner of Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) who later battles it out with a younger Immortan Joe (Lacey Hulme) for control of the Wasteland while Furiosa seeks her righteous vengeance against Dr. Dementus.

Furiosa was a film that I had mixed feelings about before going to see it as I wasn’t the biggest fan of Fury Road in 2015 despite its rave reviews, for me it felt too much like the many many many imitators that came after the smash success of 1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior plus this film would not see Charlize Theron return to the role that she did such a good job with in that previous film but the previews for this film did do enough to make me interested.

And I was glad they did as this is a great time at the cinema, it’s not my favourite film of the year (Dune Part Two is and it’s not even close) but this is up there so far, Miller’s direction is very different than in Fury Road but I felt more effective as unlike Fury Road which was essentially a 20 minute chase scene extended to a 2 hour movie this one is willing to take its time a lot more to tell its story while still giving you the high energy kinetic action fans of this series expect and I liked that difference.

Also this movie is full of fun performances and it was great to spot some Australian actors in the cast particularly John Howard, Angus Sampson and Lacey Hulme who I liked more as Immortan Joe than the late great Hugh Keays-Burne who played the role in Fury Road, I also spotted young Quaden Bayles from Miller’s previous film 3,000 Years of Longing in a brief role and it was good to see him as well.

But before I talk more about Hemsworth I have to mention both Browne and Taylor-Joy as the young Furiosa, both do a great job sometimes with just their body language and facial expressions at embodying this role and doing Theron proud as I didn’t miss her in that role in the same way I missed Mel Gibson as Max when watching Tom Hardy play that character in Fury Road.

But as for Hemsworth he is simply fantastic here and he is clearly having a great time playing this character and it shows on screen, he’s equally amusing and menacing with his ocker accent and along with the Harkonnens in Dune Part Two is my favourite villain on screen this year.

Before I wrap this review up I must talk about this part of the film that to me felt like a disgrace and that is the near erasure of the involvement of Village Roadshow Pictures from the making of this movie, their logo and branding did appear on the initial previews but on the later previews and then the film itself it was nowhere to be found and may I just remind everyone reading this:

Roadshow Gave Warner Brothers this series TO BEGIN WITH!!!!! As when they were looking to take the original Mad Max film to overseas markets in 1979 they went to Warner Brothers as at that time they had a distribution partnership with them here in Australia and WB later produced Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome in the 80s and then Warner Brothers and Roadshow co-produced Fury Road together in 2015 in what felt like to me a full circle moment but with this movie, just Warner Brothers and before that here in Australian cinemas, the fucking Universal logo as WB at the end of 2020 took a near 50 year old distribution partnership with Roadshow and flushed it down the Dunny.

And given that Mad Max is predominantly a brand that means most to Australia as compared with the rest of the world it is very disappointing personally that Roadshow’s involvement with this movie has been swept away like this and before some think “That David Zaslav’s done it again, what an utter clown” the ending of the WB/Roadshow distribution partnership wasn’t his doing, it was something he inherited when he took over the studio in 2022 and I sincerely hope he puts it back together as that would make me a very very happy boy.

With that out of the way that was Furiosa and it is the most fun I’ve had in the cinema so far this year with a more engaging story, great action and fun performances, 3 and a half out of 5.

Film Review - IF (2024)

IF stands for Imaginary Friends and is written and directed by John Krasinski and he also stars in it as a young father needing heart surgery which his young daughter (Cailey Fleming) is sad about as she has already lost her mother to illness beforehand, one day while living in her grandmother’s apartment (Fiona Shaw) she meets a neighbour named Cal (Ryan Reynolds) who runs a matching service for abandoned imaginary friends.

IF is a lot of fun and I had a big smile on my face, it made me emotional in places and it made me laugh on occasion while also thinking that Krasinski has delivered another winning film as writer and director (his 2 previous films were the first 2 A Quiet Place films which I also really liked) and along with Wonka from late last year is a good example of what family entertainment can be like for children and grown ups.

And Krasinski manages to balance the pathos and the lightness very well, the lighter moments are full of joy and good humour (I particularly like Steve Carrell as Blue, a big Grimace like imaginary friend) and the more mournful moments are handled with sincerity and touches of sadness that tugged at my heartstrings effectively enough.

The film’s Imaginary Friends are also a lot of fun to watch, there’s a slime creature, a unicorn, a marshmallow man and even a superhero bear amongst others and they feel creative and imaginative in their scenes and one touching one for me was an old teddy bear named Louie voiced by the late great Louis Gossett Jr and sadly he didn’t live to see this movie as he passed away earlier this year and it is a sad loss.

As for Ryan Reynolds I thought he was okay but for a lot of the film he acted like a bit of a grump and after a while I started getting a bit sick of it as Ryan is at his best when he’s either playing the smart ass like he does in the Deadpool movies or when he’s radiating good natured comedy that makes you smile and that isn’t really here for the most part and it hurts the movie to a certain extent.

And so that was IF and I really liked this movie, Krasinski delivers another winner and I hope families will go and give it a look but with Garfield, Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 coming up I suspect many will save their movie going money for either of those films, 4 out of 5.

Film Review - Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the newest entry in the series and is directed by Wes Ball who you may remember from such films as the Maze Runner series, many generations have passed since the death of Caesar (Andy Serkis) at the end of 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes and Apes now rule the Earth with humanity regressing to a primitive state but a young Ape named Noa (Owen Teague) must travel beyond his village home when his clan is captured in a raid and what he finds will open his eyes to the world beyond.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was a movie that when I was watching it I was really enjoying it but the more I’ve sat with it it has faded for me a little bit, now this isn’t to say it’s a bad movie because it isn’t, it was just another film that I liked and then that was it for me.

Firstly the Visual Effects work here is remarkable, the way the performance capture work and the locations blend together is near seamless, I saw an interview with Wes Ball a while back where he talked about one of his big influences on this movie being the Avatar series from James Cameron and that influence shows here as you really believe the world of the film your in.

And the other part of this is what I call the scale framing, the way the 2.35:1 aspect ratio is used here to frame the locations is terrific as they are framed in the film in a way that makes you believe that the characters are looking at the locations the way you yourself might look at them with the human eye like how you view a great vista from on high or a sunset or how you look up at a building or a clifface or forest of trees, scale framing is very important and most movies don’t put a lot of effort into it being memorable but this movie does.

This movie also has some good performances in it as well, Owen Teague is good as Noa and he holds your attention well for the screen time he has, Peter Macon is also very good as Raka one of the few to really remember Caesar’s teachings from the 2010’s trilogy of Apes films while Kevin Durand is a good villain in Proximus the leader of the masked clan who want to be the dominant Ape tribe.

But this movie is also too long for me, the film runs for 140 minutes but it felt like a long 2 and a half hours and because of that I also felt that the storytelling felt a little stretched and had the film been around the 110 to 120 minute mark I think it would’ve been a much better film with a tighter pace to make its storytelling feel punchier and more focused.

And so that was the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and it’s a solid entry that doesn’t match the 1968 original or even the 2010’s trilogy but it won’t make a monkey out of you, 3 out of 5.