THE ROAD WARRIOR (George Miller)

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Now this is how you do a post-apocalyptic thriller. Ruthless, relentless, and imaginative.

I haven't really appreciated the second film in the MAD MAX trilogy, but as I saw it again after so many years, I realized it is a timeless classic, and could have been the forefather of our present road rage films, especially the Jason Statham-starred DEATH RACE, which bears heavy references to ROAD WARRIOR. 

Mel Gibson drifts the wasteland in search of gas and gets pitted in a conflict between savages and a community encamped in the middle of the unforgiving desert. When people are not shooting each other, a deeper humanistic philosophy is revealed. Oh, and RESIDENT EVIL EXTINCTION so borrowed elements from this film. 

Having watched all three MAD MAX films (I heard a fourth one is upcoming), I derived that each can be viewed separately, and not as a single continuous story, and it works that way since the endings are never smoothly tied with the beginnings of the succeeding films. But this is definitely the best of the series. 

RATING: 4/5

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