They only managed to get one of the front tires with the spikes, hence not completely slowing down the rig.MWFV8 wrote:I don't have an issue with Max not driving as such. I just think the final chase lacks any feeling of genuine peril.
You have this War Rig which has an undetermined speed. It ends up in a drag race with the Razor Cola where both vehicles are being nudged by blowing nitro into the intakes. At this point, right at the start of the chase, we're trying to be sold the concept that the War Rig can outspeed the Razor Cola, which is kind of ridiculous. The stakes here are the Razor Cola getting in front and spiking the War Rig's tyres - which is actually does, with no detrimental effect. So you're kind of left wondering what the whole point of the scene is. This leads to one of the engines on the Rig dying and the army catching them up. It's a far too complex and overly dramatised way to cut to what could have been terrifying right from the start - the War Rig is a sitting duck and thus there's no way of reaching the canyon without a fight.
Meanwhile, you've got Vuvalini riding around on a bike and serving through the army like it's no problem up to the point where it's convenient to kill them off. One second they can appear out of nowhere and pick off the driver of the Razor Cola from a distance, the next they can't hit Immortan Joe head on with multiple shots and lack the awareness to see a tanker serving for them. We get our first protag death and it's a flash against a superimposed image.
The claw cars come in and this looks like it's going to be supercool. The setup is great. But then we're sold this notion that they can somehow take hold of the tanker with spears that pierce the metal and are prone to being cut through with bolt cutters. While this doesn't make much sense, it's blatant the vehicles aren't attached. So we get this direct comparison with the buggy grappling hook scene in Road Warrior which demonstrates exactly what would likely happen.
Now guns are going off everywhere and you're kinda sat wondering why the hell Immortan Joe's army doesn't just shoot out the tires of the War Rig, you know, like they try to do in Road Warrior? But instead we just get the usual waves of attack you get in a lot of trashy action movies. Worse still, Max is pretty much bouncing around like Action Man and it just gets silly; topping all this ridiculousness is the scene with the People Eater's tanker where Max, having momentarily seen into the future and survived an arrow to the head with his weird visions, and we've had to accept the Interceptor has now been completely destroyed, spider man jumps from the War Rig to the Tanker, takes control of it and then climbs out as it's physically exploding.
While this is going on, we've got Furiosa's struggle, which is completely undermined by Keeper Of The Seeds slowly dying right next to her. And then, completely undermining the entire premise of the final chase, Fragile decides she wants to bugger off with Rictus part way through the chase. So you're pretty much sat there thinking "Gee, good call, Cheedo, I'm with you, this is bullshit."
By then everyone is just waiting around for their turn to do something. We cut back to Max who's, been sat around checking his email or something, and we're suddenly into the scene on the Doof Wagon which looks like it was shot with the special effects budget of a PBS special.
And to top it all off, we get the final fight, and it sums the whole movie up. Furiosa gets out the War Rig, while injured, makes her way to Immortan Joe and kills him, not before of course giving him the last words he'll hear "Remember me." Where's Max? He's still wrapped up in a sub-fight with a secondary character, which absolutely hammers home that he is not the main character in this movie. And then, to add insult to injury, any remaining glory is taken by Nux, whose self sacrifice defeats the army... apparently.... even after we know they cleared a mountain of boulders from the very same canyon only an hour's viewing before.
We can argue that Fury Road is better than other modern movies, we can try and excuse it on the terms it's a different movie in a different time for a different audience, and we can cry subjective taste over object reasoning, but we cannot ignore, never mind how hard we try, or how caught up we are in the current hype, that Road Warrior did a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less, and that is they main reason we are here 35 years later.
Of course it needs to be Furiosa who kills Immortan Joe, it's her conflict with him, Max has virtually no connection to Immortan Joe whereas Furiosa's whole life has been ruled by him. It NEEDS to be her that kills him, not Max who has barely even seen him until this point.
All they needed to do was block the canyon temporarily to get back to the citadel before the army and get lifted up.
