A lunatic calling himself the Nightrider - sorry, the Night. . .RIDER! - steals a police cruiser, then dies while being pursued by the Mobile Police Force. The rest of his biker gang aren't too pleased, but nothing much comes of it until a different member of their group, the drugged out, spineless Johnny the Baby (Tim Burns), gets arrested, then released because there's no witness who will testify. The arresting officer, who everyone calls Goose (Steve Bisley), punches Johnny repeatedly on the way out the door, and is ultimately killed.
Between this and Top Gun, not a great stretch of years for guys called "Goose."
Goose's being burned alive prompts his buddy Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) to retire to live in the countryside with his wife, Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and their baby. Obviously that's not going to last. The movie's called "Mad Max," not "Mellow Max."
Yes, I used a variation on that bit when I reviewed the Mad Max video game. It amuses me, I'm using it again.
I guess because it had been a couple of years, I had the details of the plot messed up. I thought Toecutter and his bunch declared war against the MPF for Nightrider's death, and Goose's death was part of a larger war of attrition. Max retired and they hunted him down.
That's probably the way most '80s American action movies would have done it, but that's not the way George Miller plays it here. Toecutter indulges Johnny's desire for revenge - in the stupidest, most overly complicated way this gang of intelligence-deficient biker trash could manage, we'll come back to that - on Goose, and Max leaves. Then Jessie just so happens to encounter Toecutter and the gang on the way to the family farm "up north," and doesn't take kindly to his being a creep. So they take revenge for the slight to their pride. There's no indication those likely radiation-addled crank jockeys have any clue they're up against the guy that killed their pal. Hell, I'm not sure they even know he's after them for killing his baby and running over his wife. I'm not sure they ever even saw Max up at the farm. Johnny doesn't recognize him at the end, since he's convinced Max is executing him for stealing a dead man's boots.
And while Goose's death is the impetus for Max's decision, according to Max, what he's afraid of isn't death, but going round the bend. Ending up just like Toecutter and his bunch, roaming the highways, leaving wreckage and ruin behind him, the only difference being he's got a badge to excuse it all. Got some bad news for you there. . .
Of course, maybe it makes sense the story doesn't work like an action flick. Miller shoots certain scenes more like a horror movie. The extreme close-ups on the bugged-out eyes of a character right before they pancake against the grill of a big rig, wouldn't have looked out of place in a few years in Evil Dead or something similar. The scene for Jessie in the woods, the voices coming from everywhere, the mutilated dog hanging from a chain. The blue lighting as Max slowly ventures into Goose's hospital room, where you can only see an arm outlined against the sheet over top of him. As the arm drops off the side of the bed into view and Max can only stare horrified, the image seems to waver, like he passed through a translucent curtain or veil.
A threshold's been passed, whether Max knew it or not. One way or the other, he wasn't a cop any longer. He tried to run away from it all, and when that fails, takes the V-8 Interceptor meant to be the shiny toy that kept him there. And he follows the captain's order to do whatever he likes on the road. But he's not worried about paperwork being clean, any more than he's worried about being the hero his captain thinks the people need. He's something else entirely now.
Then, in other ways, it very much is an action movie. The high speed chases with so many moving parts. The spectacular car wrecks, where vehicles go flying like they were punched by the Hulk in a comic drawn by Sal Buscema. (That one poor stuntman who wipes out on the bridge and his bike cracks him in the back of the helmet as they both skip across the pavement.) The camera shots from right in front of the bumper of a speeding car, or taken to suggest the viewer is barreling right towards something. A baby, an oncoming truck. Once Max sets out for revenge, he's apparently relentless, hounding Toecutter and his guys for days at a time, ignoring a bullet wound to the leg and his arm getting run over.
Which could be that horror vibe, Max becoming something different. Especially the bit where Toecutter leaves the mechanic's shop and finds the photos of Jessie and Goose in his helmet, with no sign of who left them. That's some vengeful spirit stuff right there, but action heroes tend to be almost superhuman, so there's not a huge divide from that to a supernatural terror, especially depending on whose point of view you're watching from.
OK, the revenge on Goose. The thing about the attack on Goose is not that they kept him busy with the cabaret singer so Johnny could tamper with his bike. It's that, having caused him to wreck in the middle of nowhere, all alone, they wait until the mechanic drives out and loans him his truck to haul his motorcycle back. Then they throw something through the windshield to cause him to wreck, then ignite the gas. That's more steps than was really necessary.
Was that for plausible deniability purposes? Because I can't see these guys caring about that, and even if they did, if you run him over on an isolated strip of road while he's all alone, you don't have to worry about plausible deniability then, either.
Maybe it was just to set up what Max does to Johnny at the end. Poetic justice, ironic punishment, that sort of thing. Which, I will admit I did appreciate. Of all the bikers, Johnny's the one I dislike the most. Nightrider's a loon, and I'm not sure his brain is even on the same planet as his body. Toecutter sees himself as some leader of a wayward flock, and makes a big show of himself, but also makes certain gestures that demonstrate he feels some loyalty to his guys. Presumably he made the arrangements to pick up Nightrider's body, and they give it an entire procession, carried in the back of the pick-up with Toecutter as he sits on his lawn chair throne.
Meanwhile, Johnny's just an annoying little shit. As soon as he's got someone to hide behind here comes the tough talk, but at any other point, he's a sniveling coward, full of excuses for why nothing that happens is his fault. Quite why Toecutter wastes time and energy on protecting him I don't know. I guess because he regards Johnny as one of "his", and therefore only he has the right to punish him.
The movie says it takes place 'a few years from now,' and civilization, though mostly recognizable, is clearly on a downward swing. All the towns we see look mostly deserted, the locals worn and weary. The kind of people you'd see in the beleaguered town of a spaghetti western, where they wear every year they've lived on their faces. The mechanic tells Jessie the ice cream shop will be glad for the business. Of two people, one of them a baby, buying at best one cone apiece. That's pretty dire. The roads are empty, save the cops, the bikers and the occasional fuel tanker.
MPF headquarters look like a building that ought to be condemned. Broken windows and rot in the walls. I've seen better maintained police buildings in movies where a zombie apocalypse is in full swing. A V-8 engine is treated as some rare treasure, a miracle anyone could find one and get it running. But the MPF patrol on the edge, where things fall apart first. It was once a frontier, and it's becoming one again. We never get a good look at a big city, the most populated place is either the cabaret or that roadside diner Goose is at, where the tow trucks are faster on the ball than he is. Their trucks are in pretty good shape, shinier and newer-looking than the MPF's cars. The only business still doing well is one dedicated to salvaging the remains of tragedies.
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