For the first ever in my life I saw a movie on the first day of its release and needless to say I am very happy I choose Mad Max: Fury Road to be that film. This is easily the best Mad Max film and one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen.

For those of you who do not know me, I adore Tom Hardy. When I saw the movie Bronson 6-7 years ago I knew Mr. Hardy was going to be a great actor. I never thought he would be one of the five best actors in the world. I also had the opportunity to meet him at Comic Con a couple of years ago while he was promoting the movie Warrior. Hell, I even named my first dog Hardy. The reason for the long diatribe was the reason why I saw Mad Max today was because of him, the previous Mad Max’s (mostly the second and third ones) and how awesome the trailers looked.

It wouldn’t be a Mad Max movie without a couple holes in the writing (honestly the flaws in the writing are only minor quibbles), but people are not going to see this movie for the writing. They will go see it because they want to see cars smashing into other cars and for things to blow up spectacularly. If that’s what you are expecting to see then you will not be disappointed. I actually laughed a few times during some of the chase scenes (which is a good thing) because of the scale of the explosions were so big and how what I was seeing had little, if any, CGI. The explosions and collisions were awesome, but what may get overlooked is how beautiful a lot of the shots were, which elevates the film a car chase novelty to a beautiful piece of art.

There’s so much detail in the film that I’m going to watch it frame by frame when it comes out on Blu-Ray. For example, the dashboard of Immortan Joe’s (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne who was Toecutter in the first Mad Max film) car is full of unique decals from other cars. Most of the action takes place in real time so there is very little CGI. With the CGI that is in the movie its obvious writer-director George Miller was involved with that process too, which is a breath of fresh air from typical blockbuster movies where the CGI looks disjointed from the rest of the film.

Even though Mad Max is in the title the core of the movie is about not about Max, but the self-redemption of Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. There is hardly any dialogue, which suits Mr. Hardy and surprisingly by Mrs. Theron. If you watched The Drop and/or Locke you know all too well Mr. Hardy has the uncanny ability to tell you everything he’s thinking just with his eyes. Mr. Hardy does a great job of acting (as usual), but there wasn’t much for him to do in regards to character development. Instead, most of the opportunity for a great performance is given to Mrs. Theron and she knocks it out of the park.

Mrs. Theron has given so-so performances in the movies immediately following her Oscar (for Monster). However, in the past year or so she’s given remarkable performances in Young Adult and Snow White and the Huntsman. We don’t ever know why she’s trying to redeem herself, but her performance is so good we can infer everything by looking at her eyes.

I don’t want to talk about the plot of the film because movies are better when you do not know what to expect to see. I hope this movie makes truckloads of money because I would love to see more of the Mr. Miller has created. Tom Hardy has already signed up for four additional Mad Max’s so its possible more could be on the way. The movie is two hours long and it was one of the fastest two hours I ever experienced in a movie theatre.