Real Men Love The Road Warrior

The post-apocalyptic setting

Similar to zombies or Gary Oldman, a post-apocalyptic setting is something which can be quickly thrust into any film and make it roughly twelve times better as a result. For all intents and purposes, the fallout-laden wasteland basically gives the filmmakers an excuse to make a western, but with quasi-modern props and landscapes.

Functionally, nothing really separates Mad Max himself from The Man With No Name; both are drifters who wander into a savage, dangerous land, and have to find a way to survive. Except where Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns dealt primarily with gunfights and quickdraws, The Road Warrior dishes out badass, rock-and-roll chase sequences.

That, and cowboy hats and panchos have been replaced with leather jackets and football equipment.

“Mad” Max Rockatansky

Rating just slightly below Snake Plissken on the badass scale (due mostly to his behavior near the end of Beyond Thunderdome), Mad Max is still one of the coolest anti-heroes in cinema. As I’ve already pointed out, he’s basically a post-nuclear Man With No Name; while he’ll occasionally do good, he only does so by accident, out of anger, or for his own reasons entirely. Due to the loss of his wife and child in the original Mad Max, the character is -- by the time we meet him in The Road Warrior -- hard-boiled, selfish, and totally incapable of connecting with anyone on any level.

During most of the film, he’s trying to escape from the group of can-do freedom fighters rather than attempting to save them, and even when he does end up helping them, he does so more out of anger toward the evil marauders (more on tha tlater) and a lack of anything else to do more than a legitimate desire to do the right thing. Max has his moments of humanity (like when he gives the Feral Kid a windup musical box), but he doesn’t hesitate to act like a selfish jackass the moment his needs have been satisfied (like when he grabs the same musical box from the Feral Kid and throws it away, most likely breaking it).

Also, "Rockatansky" is the most badass surname ever conceived. Sounds like a Polish heavy metal composer.

Gayest. Henchman. Ever.

Honestly, you don’t usually see baddies who look this stereotypical outside of Japanese videogames. Now, within the context of the film, Wez is sort of a badass (he kills roughly a dozen people before the film’s end, and he also happens to be played by the same dude who played Bennett in Commando), but, well…just look at him, for Chrissakes. Fiery red hair, flamboyant peacock feathers atop his spraypainted armor – and, of course, his silent blonde manservant. It’s never explicitly mentioned that Wez and his blonde bikemate are bumping uglies, but when the Feral Kid kills Wez’s blonde buddy, Wez freaks out way too much for someone who just lost a purely platonic friend. In the wasteland, it would seem, hardass homosexuals overtake the Earth – until they get their shit wrecked by Mad Max, anyway.

Max’s dog

Is there any relationship like the one between a man and his dog? Max's dog serves as his only real friend throughout the film as he provides companionship, attacks enemies, and shares in Max's adventures whilst staying about as silent as Max himself. If you've gotta be stuck in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with an empty fuel tank and a dead soul, you might at least want a dog around to accompany you in your triumphs and misfortunes. 

Incidentally, Max's decision to help the good guys drive their tanker to freedom comes only after Max's car is blown up and his dog is killed. Given the fact that we know Max is capable of acting quite violently when his loved ones are wronged (the last, say, twenty minutes of the first Mad Max basically consists of him individually ganking all of the bikers who murdered his family), this might suggest that when Max acts like a hero and volunteers to lead the disadvantaged wanderers to freedom, he's doing it primarily to avenge his dog and car. That's some serious loyalty, but the dog (who is never named, and rarely even spoken to by Max) seems to have earned that degree of trust and respect in his willingness to stick with Max and defend him right up to his grisly death-by-crossbow.

Max vs Snake

When Max first comes upon the Professor’s helicopter, he finds a foolproof, high-tech security system: a poisonous snake, wrapped around the rotors. Rather than whacking the snake with a stick, or siccing his dog on it, or doing one of any number of logical and slightly-less-dangerous-than-what-he-actually-does things, Max decides to do the following, in this order:

1. Make a slight hissing noise, piquing the snake’s interest so it slightly uncoils

2. Stare at it for a second

3. Grab the fucking thing by the neck

4. Pull, really hard.

That’s right – not only has Max been hardened both emotionally and physically by the harshness of the wasteland and the loss of his family, but he also gained superhuman reflexes which make him faster than a motherfucking snake.

The Professor

It's pretty tough for a character to seem interesting when they spend the majority of their scenes around someone as enchantingly hardass as Mack Rockatansky, but the Professor doesn't do a bad job. His relationship to Max, and his own sense of morality, are constantly in question. Is he insane, or just eccentric? Honest, or deceitful? Romantic, or a pervert? 

We don't really get any clear answers to these questions, but the Professor is pretty intelligent (were it not for Max's dog, he probably would have been able to kill Max), his eccentricities provides a great foil to Max's stoic nature, and his brief moments of heroism (like when he drops a snake on a biker) are pretty entertaining in their own right.

Dog food

The scene where Max, his dog, and the Professor all eat dog food really stuck out in my mind the first time I saw The Road Warrior. Not only is the image of Max forking ounces of Alpo into his mouth undeniably badass, but the fact that he seems to enjoy doing it -- and the fact that the Professor is extremely, extremely eager to get the can of dog food from Max's dog -- tells you a hell of a lot about the world they live in. 

I've seen some badass film heroes in my time, but I've never seen any of them open up a can of soupy, moist dog food and scoop the shit up like it was caviar before or since The Road Warrior. The entire film could have just been two hours of Mel Gibson eating dog food, and it would have still been the most hardass thing ever put on celluloid.

Women of the wastelands

I'm fully aware that the choice to armor the film's heroes in bright white football gear was an intentional choice, reflecting the fact that the entire town Max finds is made up of scavengers rather than warriors. I get that. It still doesn't make the women look any less hilarious or dated than they do. There are really only three women in the film: the Old Bitch, who sort of just runs around and whines about how sad it is that everyone is dying, the Innocent Chick, who has a patently absurd hairdo and is frequently hit on by the Professor, and Warrior Queen, the (pictured) Amazon she-woman who, with her football pads and headband, looks like she has a bigger dick than I do.

I'd hit it, of course, but it appears that the apocalypse was not kind to the fairer sex if the best they can offer is a woman who basically looks like a skinny, long-haired version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The goddamned Feral Kid looks more feminine than this chick.

Misfire

By the halfway point of the film, we're pretty much convinced that Max as a badass...but when you think about it, we don't really have much reason to, outside of the snake-choking incident. Max threatens countless baddies and other characters with his trusty double-barreled shotgun, and he certainly gives off the aesthetic appearance of a total badass, but he never really kicks the shit out of anyone in the way that one would assume a badass does on a regular basis. 

It is with great anticipation, then, that we see Max load his shotgun with some scavenged shells as he prepares to steal a semi in the middle of the film. "This is it," the audience thinks. "We finally get to see Mad Max blow someone apart with that badass hand cannon."  

Indeed, as Max speeds his semi back to the base, Lord Humungus (the main bad guy who looks like Jason Voorhees -- he doesn't get his own bullet point because he does practically goddamn nothing, despite having the visual potential to be the biggest badass in the entire film) takes out a pistol, and the entire scene feels like it might be a genuine western-style quickdraw duel, except one of the characters is driving a damned semi. 

And so Max keeps driving, Humungus aims, Max speeds up and pulls out his shotgun, Humungus continues to aim, Max pulls the trigger, and --

Misfire. The gun flares up, the shell totally and utterly useless.

It's a real double-take moment -- outside of Unforgiven, I've yet to see any other film screw over its main character by having him suffer a misfire. In action films, misfires simply don't happen. When one actually happens to Max, and that it would happen at a moment where the audience fully expects him to finally buckle down and start spraying bastards with buckshot, just feels cool. It totally fits within the harsh environment of the film, it flies in the face of action film convention, and it makes the action a hell of a lot more satisfying when Max actually gets some functional shells and blows away a few people in the final chase sequence.

Blade Boomerang vs Some Idiot’s Fingers = Awesome

The Feral Kid sort of irritates me, so he doesn't get his own bullet point. His weapon, however, does. The Feral Kid basically has a sharpened steel boomerang which only he can catch and throw through use of a special glove. With it, he kills Wez's blonde boyfriend, and -- as seen above -- cuts off the fingers of a borderline retarded gang member. This particular member, whose sole job seems to consist of introducing Lord Humungus through use of hyperbole and absurd nicknaming (I hope that one day, I, too, will have the good fortune to be referred to as "The Ayatollah of Rock-and-Roll-ah"), watches the Feral Kid kill Wez's bee eff, watches Wez attempt to throw the boomerang back at the kid, and then -- fucking stupidly -- attempts to catch the boomerang himself. With his bare hands.

Guess what happens.

What's funny is that, after losing all of his fingers to the boomerang, the idiot doesn't really seem to be in that much pain. He grimaces afterwards, yeah, but he looks around at his hysterically guffawing comrades as he does so, almost as if he's more embarrassed at the idea of being laughed at than the prospect that he'll never be able to masturbate with his dominant hand anymore. The image of the moron losing his fingers is fucking brutal; watching the idiot to play off the whole thing as a funny little accident makes the scene even more memorable.

The most Australian-sounding character in existence

One of the few -- if not only -- characters in the film designed solely to provide comic relief, the mechanic's assistant only appears for one scene, but spends the entirety of it loudly shouting questions and answers between the leader of the freedom fighters and the crippled mechanic. The scene basically goes like this: 

1. The Good Guy Leader asks a question of the mechanic

2. The Super-Aussie Assistant needlessly repeats the question to the mechanic

3. The mechanic answers quietly

4. The Super-Aussie Assistant shouts the answer back at the Good Guy Leader, with a hilariously pronounced Australian accent

5. Repeat.

The assistant's absurdly loud voice, pronounced accent, and hilariously unnecessary presence in the scene make him one of the oddest characters in the entire film. We spend 90 minutes around scary, stoic badasses like Max or Humungus or Wez, and then this grinning, innocent, idiotic mechanic's assistant comes in for one scene and adds roughly eight metric tons of comic relief right when the audience least expects it. Fantastic.

The final chase sequence

I'll point out some of the best parts in a minute, but first, here's the chase in its entirety (be warned -- it's 16 minutes, and basically constitutes the entire end of the film. If you're thinking about rewatching the film anytime soon, just skip this bit and go straight to the highlights):

WHEEEEEE!

About three quarters of the way through the chase, Max rams a dune buggy into a broken down, stationary vehicle. His forward momentum suddenly and mercilessly stopped by the crash, the poor bastard riding atop the dune buggy is thrown off and seems to fly roughly fifty goddamn feet through the air before landing offscreen. A maneuver like this, which was done totally practically, represents the sort of stunts we just don’t see anymore thanks to the overuse of CGI. I realize I bitch about the overabundance of computer-generated graphics in nearly every “Real Men Love” article I do, but The Road Warrior stands as a testament to how badass an action film one can make without a single friggin’ computer. Nowadays, the only CG-devoid action romps we receive come courtesy of Quentin Tarantino -- and his last one didn’t do so well.

Max puts a child in danger

Yeah, Max has decided to help the good guys find their way to paradise. Yeah, he's got a character arc. Yeah, he's sort of gotten a sliver of his humanity back.

But that doesn't mean Max isn't above putting a 10-year-old kid in danger just for the sake of getting his shotgun shell back.

Near the very end of the chase, Max is in the process of reloading his hand cannon when his semi gets rammed from the back, sending the shell careening through the windshield, where it lands precariously on the truck's hood. As Max is pinned to his seat by some random biker's chain/hook weapon thing, he can't reach the shell himself...so he orders a goddamn child to.

This moment perfectly distills everything awesome about Mad Max as a character; he's capable of good, but, at the same time, he doesn't really give two shits about other people to the point where he'd put a child in extreme danger just to save his own life. Child abuse schmild abuse. 

Pointless-yet-entertaining quasi-nudity

It wouldn’t be a low budget cult-classic if they couldn’t find an excuse to put gratuitous almost-sex on screen for a few seconds, would it?

The final orgasmacrash

While the logic of the final crash of the climactic car chase is dubious at best -- why  in God's name would Lord Humungus, whilst riding a dune buggy, play chicken with a motherfucking semi? -- but its incomprehensible nature in no way detracts from how down-and-dirty badass the final, orgasmic car crash is.

When Max's semi plows directly into Lord Humungus's, car parts fly in literally every direction like candy out of a pinata -- again, all done with 100% practical effects. At the moment of the crash, one might initially feel gypped that Max and Humungus don't get to face off in some drawn-out, climactic battle, but the sheer badassity and viscera of the car crash itself makes for a more than fitting climax to a film which, if analyzed on its most basic level, is essentially car chase porn. 

It's brutal. It's fantastic. It's effective.

Real men love it.