Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Director: George Miller, George Ogilvie

Cast: Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Helen Buday, Bruce Spence

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: It’s a weird question about which to ultimately be on the fence, but this is either the worst of the Mad Max series, or the best one. It’s entirely possible that it exists in a quantum state, where it is both the worst and the best film in the series.

The hard edge simplicity of the film previous (and to a large extent, the latter) films in the series is gone, and in its place are an array of kids and a couple of power ballads from Turner. This is fundamentally a run of the mill American action movie of the 1980s. It doesn’t really need to feature the Australian Wasteland, or even Max (Gibson) at all. The way I know this is that somebody like Kevin Costner could—and did, now that I think about it—make similar movies for the next ten years. As a whole this series seeks to thrill more than it makes one want to feel, but here the mixture is tilted in the other direction.

Perhaps sensing that the series might be getting too big for its origins, we are served with more than a few great action sequences—especially the fight in the titular Thunderdome, the power ballads are actually quite good (I’ve been singing “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” to myself for days now), and that pathos brings Max to as close a conclusion as his world and trauma might allow… Which is, of course, reset years later by Mad Max Fury Road (2015)*.

But do you want to know the most insidious part? With this film approaching a thematic ending for the character (while still not quite pulling the trigger), and the power of Max maybe finding redemption (or at least an ending) I would kind of be interested in one more Mad Max film with the old road warrior reaching his conclusion, either with some peace or with complete destruction. With Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) not doing so hot at the box office, and Gibson ramping up to release a sequel—yes, you read that right—to Passion of the Christ, it’s probably not going to happen.

*While the series is supremely disinterested in continuity or canon, today I learned that you van form a loose continuity by tracking the injuries to Max’s eyes and knees. Now you know, too.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

Director: George Miller

Cast: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Kjell Nilsson, Emil Minty

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: Maybe? It’s going to be hard to watch Gibson do much of anything anymore, that’s just the reality of it, but it’s always a little bit easier to look at him when he’s still got youth and the apparent ability to hide some of his more hateful tendencies. Is that a reasonable way to judge a movie? I’d say yes. He’s a pretty bad guy, and it’s probably not a great idea to grade him on a curve because only some of his worst traits might engender an assault charge if he weren’t rich.

Well, now that we have that out of the way. I felt like I went to easy on him in my review of the original Mad Max (1979).

Where the original film felt like an entry from an entirely different movie series, this all feels like a Mad Max movie. Anyone who loved Mad Max Fury Road (2015) or Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) will probably find plenty to enjoy here, if they can get over any of the stuff I complained about earlier, and are fine with a film that is happily of an era unconcerned with injecting feminism into its action films.

There is grime, and despair, and yes, Virginia, there is a tanker truck. What would one of these films be without a tanker truck? Probably the original film, or, worse yet, Waterworld (1995). Ultimately, though the film has that secret sauce that I think makes these films as watchable as they are: very little dialogue. Nothing will ruin an action movie set “a few years from now” more than the need to explain how things came to be this way, and Miller understands this. If anything else, the less we have to hear Gibson, the more we can still tolerate him in the here and now.

Mad Max (1979)

Director: George Miller

Cast: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: Is the question whether or not one recommends this movie, or if one would recommend this movie to audiences who have enjoyed the rest of the series, and especially Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)?

This first adventure into the bleak and desperate with Rockatansky (Gibson, improbably baby-faced here) has a lot of what one might ask from a film like this. Yes, there’s testosterone and petrol-drenched action for long stretches. The future is bleak. Everyone has an Australian accent. You are unlikely to ask for your money back.

If we’re going by the second question, I’m not sure I would recommend it. Everything is incredibly detached from what follows. We’re told society is breaking down, but society is everywhere, or at least it seems like a vaguely recognizable version of the austere level of society we all claim to enjoy today. This would be pretty easily forgiven. Miller and company were working with a shoe-string budget and still figuring out what they could or wanted to do in the movies. The problem becomes that offering this much back story into Max and offering us a glimpse of the world before everything went wrong, I’m stuck watching the movies to follow and can’t help but wonder how things went from some sub-Robocop level of lawlessness to the highly stylized anarchy—let’s call it Planet of the Aussies—of the later films. I think if you’re going to watch Fury Road wondering how things could get this theatrically bad in the hypothetical lifespan of one man, then you’re probably going to have a bad time. This is not the film series for those kinds of questions.

Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Joss Ackland

Have I Seen it Before: Again, sure.

Did I Like It: I almost want to take back my retroactive ambivalence about <Lethal Weapon (1987)>. There were instances—indeed, long stretches—where I was less distracted by how awful Mel Gibson has proven himself to be.

My immediate instinct is to to say that there’s so much Three Stooges shtick jammed into the film that I can’t help but be annoyed at the movie for an entirely different set of Gibson’s predilections… But that doesn’t cover it: I actually found myself liking the film.

Part of that is that this feels like a more personal story for Riggs, if not necessarily Murtaugh (Glover). The previously unseen unravelling of his life now fuels part of the plot. While the whole “I’m the villain and the cause of all your problems” has been done to death here (and, indeed, is a reprise in the great summer of 1989 after Batman (1989) pulled the same trick), it does give some narrative fuel to Riggs’ Riggsiness, whereas in the last film it just felt like a randomly selected character trait to serve his mismatched pairing with Murtaugh.

Also, the conceit behind the film is somewhat ingenious in its simplicity. What is an Action Movie Cop (tm) to do when the evil crime lords also have diplomatic immunity. Granted, it could have easily been a plot in a Robocop film, would have been right at home creating issues for John McClane in a Die Hard sequel, or even any number of Schwarzenegger or Stallone characters. But Riggs and Murtaugh got there first, so they get the points… If points were something we were keeping track of in 1980s action films.

Lethal Weapon (1987)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Mitchell Ryan, Gary Busey

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Let’s reckon with a strange question before I get into any qualities of the movie. Why is there so much sturm und drang as to whether or not Die Hard (1988) is a Christmas movie (it, is by the way, but that’s a discussion for another review), when this movie gets hardly a peep?

I wonder if it is mostly that by the time that these silly movie debates held on the internet became a thing, Mel Gibson as one of the all-time leading men had firmly become a thing of the past.

And that’s the thing I’m most struck by here. We’re supposed to like Mel Gibson. Feel sorry for him. Even with this being the ur of the modern buddy action movie, it’s hard to separate Mel Gibson the man from Martin Riggs the character. All of that manic energy will soon be harnessed into something pretty ugly. Makes it difficult to have a good time, and isn’t that the point of a movie like Lethal Weapon?

I was struck recently by reading that Richard Donner’s first choice for Riggs was his Superman (1978) discovery, Christopher Reeve. I have a hard time imagining that, as even when Reeve played slightly unhinged and despicable, he had a gentleness that couldn’t fully be erased. That he went ahead and made Superman IV - The Quest for Peace (1987) was probably the wrong move for him, but I probably would have been able to more fully dwell on the action, the chemistry between Riggs and Murtaugh, and Donner’s direction.

Now, it all feels a bit too weird for words. No one knows the fate of the long-threatened Lethal Finale now that Donner has passed on, but I can’t help but imagine that one being really weird.