Will A Local Director's Retro Franchise Revival Become One Of The Best Action Films Ever?

Mad Max: Fury Road has been out in cinemas for all of 24 hours and, already, the professional and amateur reviews it is garnering around the web have put it on a solid trajectory to assert itself as one of the most critically acclaimed action films in history, certainly by a septuagenarian director.

Indeed, 36 years after George Miller first introduced us to the dystopian stretches of the Mad Max universe, the 70-year-old auteur has enjoyed a stunning resurgence of relevance as acclaim has continued to be heaped upon Fury Road as a more-than-worthy successor to Mel Gibson's initial franchise.

Don't get us wrong, there are certainly detractors out there, but largely the response to Mad Max has been uniformly positive in a way that a straight-up, balls-to-the-wall, no-nonsense-but-totally-nonsense action flick hasn't seen since the years of immovable icons such as Die Hard and Aliens. Given its early response, we could well be looking at the next film to join the go-to name-drop pile when referring to movies that manage to be mostly about blowing stuff up but still somehow manage to shine as examples of the cinematic medium.

For example, on review aggregation hub Metacritic, Mad Max: Fury Road is presently enjoying an average critical — not user — rating of 89, sitting pretty healthily at the #115th-highest-rated movie of all time on the site. There aren't terribly many "typical" action films ahead of it — Pulp Fiction, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and the second two Lord Of The Rings films are about the closest we get, and the last two only count because of all the dead orcs — remembering of course that this list is ordered by critical score. The titles you'd expect to see (your Die Hards, Alienses, etc) all appear on the user-score list… but Fury Road hasn't been out long enough to yet generate an aggregate score on that list, and it's already beating those long-held guardians of the genre for critical response.

Indeed, on the professional side of things, it's seems an absolute lock: the film has received perfect scores — 100%, A+, no faults detected — from New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Portland Oregonian, the Austin Chronicle, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Post, RogerEbert.com, Empire, Total Film, The Telegraph, and the Los Angeles Times, among others, with TheWrap, The A.V. Club, Variety, Rolling Stone, St Louis Post-Dispatch and Slant all rating it 85/100 or higher.

In fact, of the 42 professional reviews the film has gathered so far on Metacritic, only one has been even close to negative — and even that one, from the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, awarded the film 50/100, which is at least passable.

Even our occasionally curmudgeonly cinema buff, Anthony Carew, was sold on the film's charms, awarding it four out of five stars and describing it as "a whole lot of fucking fun, an amphetamine-addled action movie that makes 120 minutes feel all too brisk".

But perhaps the biggest stamp of approval of all has just come from original franchise star and late-life fruit-loop Mel Gibson, with Fairfax reporting that the actor-turned-director-turned-headline had expressed his approval of the new film at the Cannes film festival.

"Mel is someone, in a sense, who cannot lie," Miller said. "He started chuckling through the movie and I thought, 'Ah, that's the chuckle I remember.'"

"It was kind of an emotional moment for me," he continued. "He gave me great respect at the end, as a director. He's a wonderful actor, and a really great director."

And, from the sounds of it, a decent judge of movies, too. 

Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult, is in cinemas now.