Just as Tom Hardy’s taciturn Max was not the dramatic center of director and co-writer George Miller’s hyper-kinetic Mad Max: Fury Road — that honor went to Charlize Theron’s rebellious Praetorian Furiosa and her mad quest to find a paradise in the wasteland — so that same Furiosa is not the center of the more reflective but still wildly mobile prequel Furiosa. This time, it’s Chris Hemsworth’s hook-nosed, ambitious and vicious, frequently weird and somewhat less frequently wise gang leader Dr. Dementus who gets the sidelong spotlight. Dementus just wants what’s best for his people, even if he himself is doomed to despair, now that the endlessly warring world has taken those he loved and left him with just a stuffed bear for comfort. And what’s best for his people, as far as he can tell, is for little captive Furiosa to tell him where he can find her Edenic home — the sort of place where fruit trees still grow, even after humanity has all but wiped the world clean in its mad embrace of violence. Talking of which, Dementus kills Furiosa’s mom in an effort to get the location, thus giving our big-eyed heroine her raison d’etre for much of the rest of the film. But before he can get the girl to talk, he stumbles into the unholy trinity of Fury Road’s makeshift civilization — The Citadel, Gastown, and the Bullet Farm — and the mental wheels start turning. Phew! That’s a lot of plot just to set the scene — small wonder the thing runs two and a half hours. And yeah, some of that scene-setting involves surprisingly clunky special effects/sound work — how exactly do people chat in a sandstorm? But once the gears catch and things get rolling, literally and otherwise, the ride is by turns thrilling and fascinating, a brutal, complicated struggle of conflicting interests and strategies leading to a desert showdown that is…well, a word on that. It's talky, and it slams the action to a halt, and it sounds very much like an authorial statement: Dementus throwing off his eccentric speech and vocabulary and revealing the dark heart of the Mad Max saga. But it also makes way for a nasty, batty, but strangely redemptive segue into Fury Road’s story. Make it epic, indeed. With Anya-Taylor Joy. (2024) — Matthew Lickona