Self-consciousness must surely be the keynote of the Mad Max sequel, which would appear to have been made in astonished response to the popular and critical approval heaped on the unassuming forerunner, and which, as a result, appears to be much more scrutinizing of itself, much more full of itself. The high-flown tone of the opening narration plus montage soon settles down to a tolerable level, and the movie (directed, as was its forerunner, by George Miller) gets on with that vigorous, high-velocity style of violence that so distinguished the first Max adventure, and that makes us fear for the lives of the flesh-and-blood stunt men, never mind the pasteboard characters. But the justification for all this violence is harder to put a finger on here, and really it's no use trotting out Carl Jung, universal myth, and the collective unconscious (as the publicity notes do) in an attempt to add intellectual ballast to the movie's deliberate duplications of a couple of basic Western-movie motifs: the besieged frontier fort (or, in this case, oil refinery) and the pursued stagecoach or wagon train (or, here, petrol truck). With Mel Gibson. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd
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