Max gives her a little smile and boyish thumbs-up. He is impassive, to say the least: the nearest Tom Hardy’s Max comes to an emotional outburst is when Splendid does something very brave while hanging on to the side of the truck. Dialogue is at a minimum, and when Max says anything it is usually preceded by an eccentric rumbling, mumbling mmmm sound, like a macho Mr Bean. Mad Max: Fury Road is almost a silent film in its way. It is Theron – or possibly Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, playing a sultry breeder called Splendid – who is channelling the eerily beautiful Gibson from 1979, except that probably neither is pretty enough. As Max, the craggy but full-lipped Tom Hardy doesn’t look anything like Mel Gibson. Max and Furiosa are heading for a spectacular showdown with their oppressor, and must also deal with Joe’s mercurial, shaven-headed footsoldier Nux, played by Nicholas Hoult. Once captured like Max, and turned into a gladiatorial warrior in Joe’s service, Furiosa is now furious at his patriarchal tyranny she is escaping, taking with her an improbable phalanx of scantily clothed young women, the “breeders” the warlord wishes to make the mothers of his children (they look as if they are heading for an edgy Australian Vogue photoshoot). Max is fated to escape with another rebel: the one-armed Imperator Furiosa, played with glittery-eyed panache by Charlize Theron, whose job was to lead raids, stealing gasoline, ammo and other commodities. He is captured by the hateful chieftain Immortan Joe (played by Mad Max veteran Hugh Keays-Byrne) and taken to his grotesque stronghold, the Citadel, where Joe warlords it over an oppressed semi-bestial populace by controlling the water supply and bizarrely supplementing their fluid intake with industrial quantities of mother’s milk, farmed from imprisoned pregnant women. Max is here a lone wolf, a survivor of the vaguely delineated global catastrophe that has made oil, water and bullets rare commodities thereabouts, and he is tormented by flashback memories of the child he couldn’t save.
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Watch Mad Max: Fury Road trailer in full – video Guardian