Mad Max 2 opens on a lie the rest of the film spends 96 minutes making true. George Miller’s sequel to his own 1979 film presents a world where the war is over and everyone lost. Petrol is the only currency left, and a man with a working car is a man with a country.
Released in Australia on 24 December 1981 and in the United States as The Road Warrior, Mad Max 2 stars Mel Gibson returning as Max Rockatansky, the former Main Force Patrol officer who watched a biker gang kill his family and then killed every member of it. He begins this film as a shell of a man, driving the Outback with a dog and a shotgun, scavenging food and fuel from wrecks. He is not a hero yet. He is a survivor with good reflexes.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
A Gyrocopter, a Dog, and a Bad Deal
The plot is a machine built to move. Max outmanoeuvres a band of marauders led by the biker Wez, steals petrol from their wrecks, and then tries to drain the fuel from an apparently abandoned gyrocopter. The pilot ambushes him. Max overpowers the man with his dog’s help and spares his life in exchange for being led to a working oil refinery the pilot has found.
That pilot is the Gyro Captain, played by Bruce Spence with a grin that Richard Corliss, writing for Time, called “a deranged parody of the World War I aerial ace: scarecrow skinny, gaily clad, sporting a James Coburn smile with advanced caries.” It is the best description anyone has written of the performance, and it is also the whole comic register of the film in one sentence.
The refinery is under siege. Every day a motorised gang attacks the compound. The settlers inside are defended by scrap and nerve, led by Pappagallo, played by Michael Preston, a man who, in the source’s words, “carries the weight of his predicament with swaggering dignity.” The novelization of the film gave Pappagallo a history as an executive for one of the “7 Sisters” petroleum firms who lost his family in the war and became a leader of refugees trying to build a new civilisation. None of that is in the film. The film gives you the swagger and lets you guess the rest.
Lord Humungus and the Men He Commands
Arrayed against the settlers is the gang, and at the head of it is Lord Humungus, a masked man played by Kjell Nilsson. Humungus offers to spare the settlers’ lives in exchange for their fuel supply. He is not a monster who wants blood. He is a businessman who wants the tanker, and the mask and the chains only make the offer worse.
His lieutenant is Wez, played by Vernon Wells, a mohawked, leather-clad biker. Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, called Wez the “most evil of The Humungus’s followers…[a] huge brute who rides around on his bike, snarling psychotically.” In a 1985 interview with Danny Peary, Miller said the characters of Wez and Max are near mirror images of each other. That is the film’s real subject, and it is delivered without a line of dialogue explaining it.
The gang also includes the Toadie, played by Max Phipps, the crier of Humungus’s crew and a classic sycophant. There is a Feral Kid, played by Emil Minty, who lives in the refinery compound and kills Wez’s partner with a metal boomerang. There is a Warrior Woman, played by Virginia Hey. There is Zetta, played by William Zappa, a Mechanic, played by Steve J. Spears, and a Curmudgeon, played by Syd Heylen. The names tell you what the film thinks of them. The film is not wrong.
The Semi-Trailer Is the Whole Movie
Here is the deal that structures the back half. Max saw a wrecked semi-trailer and prime mover earlier in the film. He offers to bring the settlers the truck so they can haul away their tanker full of oil, if they return his car and let him go. Before that, he tries a smaller deal: he rescues Nathan, the sole survivor of a car the marauders chase down, and agrees to return him to the compound in exchange for fuel. Nathan dies after Max gets him back. Pappagallo tells Max the deal died with Nathan. The settlers are about to confiscate Max’s car and cast him out when the marauders return to negotiate.
That sequence is the film’s thesis. Max is not owed anything. He has to earn the fuel, and the earning is the movie. The tanker run that follows is the action sequence the film is remembered for, and it works because the film spent an hour making you understand exactly how much the truck is worth and exactly how little anyone can be trusted with it.
The dialogue is famously spare. The source notes that the film’s sparing use of dialogue was unprecedented for an action film. That is not a quirk. It is the reason the film still plays. Max says almost nothing, so the audience has to read him, and Gibson gives them something to read: a man who has decided that helping is not the same as healing.
What the Film Got Right and What It Skips
Mad Max 2 was released to widespread critical acclaim, with praise for Gibson’s performance, the musical score, cinematography, action sequences and costume design. It was a box office success, and its post-apocalyptic and punk aesthetics helped popularise the genre in film and fiction writing. At the 10th Saturn Awards it won Best International Film and was nominated for five more: Best Director, Best Actor for Gibson, Best Supporting Actor for Spence, Best Writing, and Best Costumes for Norma Moriceau.
Filming took place around Broken Hill, in the Outback of New South Wales. That location is doing work the script cannot. The landscape is barren in a way that makes the fuel depot look like a city and the highway look like a border. Miller shoots the desert as a place with no margin. When a car breaks, the person in it is already dead. The film never has to say this.
The costume design, nominated for that Saturn and made by Moriceau, is the other half of the world-building. Leather, mohawks, football pads, chains. The gang looks like a civilisation that looted a sporting goods store and a fetish club and then forgot which was which. It is funny and it is threatening at the same time, which is the hardest thing this kind of film can do.
What the film skips is interior life. Max’s grief is established, not explored. The settlers are types more than people. Pappagallo gets dignity and a plan, not a scene where he explains what he lost. The Gyro Captain gets a girl, played by Arkie Whiteley, and a deal, and not much else. If you want a film where the apocalypse is a metaphor for a marriage, this is not it.
The Sequels and the Century That Followed
Mad Max 2 was followed by Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The franchise continued, and so did the fan clubs for the film and “road warrior”-themed activities, which the source notes continue into the 21st century. That is a strange afterlife for a film this lean. Most action films that spawn decades of cosplay are generous with lore. This one is generous with motion.
Mad Max 2 is widely hailed as both one of the greatest action films of all time and one of the greatest sequels ever made. It earns the second claim more than the first. As a sequel, it does something rare: it takes the first film’s ending, a man who has lost everything and killed everyone responsible, and asks what that man does on a Tuesday. The answer is that he makes a deal, gets burned, makes a better deal, and drives a truck through a wall of motorcycles. That is not a redemption arc. It is a work ethic.
Where the Film Still Holds
The parts of Mad Max 2 that have aged best are the ones with no dialogue. The tanker chase, the boomerang kill, the moment Humungus makes his offer and the settlers have to decide whether to believe a masked man.
The parts that have aged worst are the ones that need a person. The settlers are a crowd, and the film never gives you a reason to care which of them lives.
The Score
Ranking the film’s assets, in order of how much they carry:
- The tanker run, which is the reason the film is taught.
- The costume design, which does more world-building than the script.
- Gibson’s performance, which is mostly silence and jaw.
- The Broken Hill landscape, which makes the stakes physical.
- The Gyro Captain, who is the only character allowed to be funny.
That is a strong list. It is also a list with a hole in the middle, where the people should be. The film is a machine, and machines this well built do not need you to love them. They need you to watch, and you will.
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