Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

**The best of the Mad Max films**
High production values and a compelling story line make this the best of the series. This one doesn't rely on basic car smashes for the duration and instead gives us a moving and more thoughtful adventure.
No campy men dressed for the _Blue Oyster_ bar in this one, thank goodness. _The Road Warrior_ (1981) is widely regarded as the best but I have to disagree. That film had a very one note narrative that verged on the bland and an overload of homoerotic imagery.
This is a beautiful looking and entertaining film that does not have the shoddy and amateur vibe of the first two. _Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome_ is the film that the first should have been.
- Charles Dance

Max Rockatansky and the Goonie feral gang.
Even allowing for my unabashed love of the first two films in the franchise, and sweeping away any sort of biased leanings I might of had for the character of Max, I just can't bring myself to rate at average this cartoonery waste of space that so nearly soils what had gone before it.
Gone is the rugged nasty streak that brought feeling to the character Mad Max Rockatansky, gone is the impacting feeling of desolation in an apocalyptic world, and more crucially, gone is director George Miller's passion for the franchise. The dreadful score matches the cartoon heart of the film, it seems that the makers didn't really know what to do with the amount of cash given to make this third instalment. Sure the stunts are spot on (to be expected by now), and of course Miller manages to paint a barren desert landscape by purely lifting from what he has done before. Yet he clearly struggled for fresh ideas with the action since "The Road Warrior's" crowning glory of the Petrol Tanker pursuit is replicated here, only he uses a train instead!!.
It's just a very poor show that may have seemed like an ambitious turn of events back in the mid 1980s, but when viewing the three films together now, Thunderdome just comes across as a director losing his edgy approach whilst sadly getting caught between the mix of comedy and fantasy action. And the truth is that neither of those genre slants would have worked singularly, in the context of this series, anyway. I give the film 3/10 purely for one real good Thunderdome fight sequence, while the stunt men here deserve some credit at the very least. But this is the third time I have tried to like this film, and as glutton for punishment as I undoubtedly am, I wont be trying again, ever.