ARTS Page 8 Saturday, July 13, 1985 The Michigan Daily 'Max' confounds with disjunct thrills By Byron L. Bull AFTER Mad Max and the Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome goes down like a plate of very stale leftovers - garishly overseasoned to try to disguise the fact but none the more palatable. It's lavish and glossy, but a surprisingly lazy rehash of its predecessors, likely to disappoint the Max cultist, and make the unacquainted wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place. Mel Gibson is back as Max, and still makes a good looking icon, covered in leather and guns, standing poised against crimson setting sun, though this time he's older, his shoulder length dark hair tinged with gray streaks - after Captain Kirk's crisis in Star Trek II, stories about aging heroes are the trend. The setting is Bartertown, a desert villa that looks like the Planet of the Apes set redressed for Bladerunner and populated by nasty punkers and punkettes. Bartertown is run by Amazonian war queen Auntie Entity (Tina Tur- ner) who's locked in a fierce struggle for the town with Master Blaster, a dwarf genius and imbecilic giant who are strapped together in a symbiotic relationship as one character. Auntie lives above Bartertown in a pen- thouse scaffold, while Master Blaster skulks below in a subterranean refinery where herds of pigs are corraled and their feces turned into methane gas, which is used to run the city. Max ends up smack between the two, hired by Auntie to do in the Blaster half of Master Blaster, only to eventually change his mind when the duty exceeds his expectations. Disjun- ctly thrown in on top of this are a group of aboriginal desert children who mistake Max for their messiah, and a Initially, Mel Gibson almost achie' randomly inserted number of fight the movie progresses Gibson's port scenes, which are so haphazardly film's action sequences. The real Ma stuck into the film you're often unsure comic book - this time around Max' just who is kicking who's ass and why. back and get hit in the face with a sho Where Mad Max and Road Warrior wouldn't notice? were low budget adventures with threadbare stories recycled from old B-westerns redeemed by director curiously more confused and haggard, George Miller's razor-fisted flair for than earlier Max's. And what violent chase scenes and precious little swashbuckling Gibson pyrotechnics, Thunderdome is indulges in lacks any enthusiasm; one elaborately mounted, overrun with suspects he did this role more for too many conflicting, grossly over- money or as a favor than out of baked subplots, and woefully thin on genuine interest. the cheap thrills and orgiastic mayhem that made the first two films As for Tina Turner, she looks great infamous in the first place. in her sixty pounds of chain mail and Like Clint Eastwood's recent Pale armor but hasn't got any real verve to Rider, Thunderdome is a shaggy kit- her mean strutting. She stumbles sch of old spaghetti westerns and embarrassingly over her dialogue, and comic book cliches, expensively the essence of her stage presence is realized, and raised to grandiose pure pop-star camp theatricism that operatic pretentions. There's lots of wears thin early on. talk about heroes and legends, but no heroic deeds to back it up. The emphasis here is not on the Mel Gibson still looks great just characters but on the background, standing there,- he can't help it - and Thunderdome reaches the but his character in this incarnatiwj is elaborate, advful conclusion of the 4 4 4 4 yes the Mad Max character, but as Tina Turner as Auntie Entity looks menacing in her 300 pounds of chain trayal becomes as disjunct as the mail, but fails to capitalize on it. As such, her effect is purely visual, td Max was never so sophmorically making her interchangeable with Grace Jones as a villainess. Turner's can throw a 300-pound man over his character is prominent at the beginning and towards the end, but forgot- vel and not bleed. Did they think we ten during the middle - not a good strategy for the source of the film's major conflict. 4 series' running fascination with the shaggy visual joke about baroque punk architecture, with hordes of' leather and spike-adorned skinheads and extravagantly retrofitted struc- tures, all of which we've seen imitated countless times now in Max imitators and MTV videos, and all of which is really old hat now. George Miller serves only as direc- tor of action sequences, with one George Ogilvie actually helming the whole project. Ogilvie is competent in a pragmatic way, shooting the film as if it were one extended rock video, primarily concerned with polish and slickness - without any real style - and misjudging the crass tackiness that was one of the series' genuine charms. at each other with chainsaws and hrmrsd knives in a brutally madcap charade The batter part of Thunderdome i strongly reminiscent of the con- spent on bizarre malicious parodying clusion of the Bugs Bunny short The of pop culture artifacts, with weird Rabbit of Seville. A climactic chase post-apocalyptic versions of Big Time scene at the end, essentially a Xerox Wrestling and television game shows of the end of Road Warrior, has plenty where the losers meet grim fates. of superlative stunt work and Only Ogilvie doesn't have a keen and elaborately rigged crashes that are warped enough sense of humor to monotonously superfluous and ill- make it click, and the film wallows in conceived. silly toothless burlesque much of the time. The net result is a movie that's like As for Miller's contribution, he comes up with one really sharp fight between Max and Blaster that takes place within the Thunderdome of the title, wherein the combatants are suspended from the ceiling of a lat- ticework dome on elastic ropesand go a two-hour trailer, promising a lot but never satisfying your appetite. Perhaps the best summary would be to cite the crowd of Max enthusiasts at the film's opening, who cheered and howled during the opening credits, but stalked out during the credits muttering, "What the hell?!"