There was a time, previous to the release of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, where ranking all of the Mad Max films would possibly be a bit of needless writing as the franchise seemed dead and there were only three movies. However, with the release of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, it’s very clear that Mad Max is a living franchise and thus definitely needs a ranking from worst to best.
To be perfectly clear, as of right now there is no bad Mad Max movie, there are just five good movies, so when we rank one of them in last place, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means it’s less good than the rest. Director/creator/writer George Miller is an absolute maverick of a filmmaker, and with his Mad Max films, he has delivered a slew of different styles of film that all work in their own way. But which way is best? Find out below.
5. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
When your worst movie establishes a term (Thunderdome) still used in regular conversation today, you’ve made a really good worst movie. Still, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a bit of an outlier among the other films in the franchise. The only PG-13 film, the movie is the least action-filled and the most traditional in terms of Hollywood blockbusters, even featuring an acting turn and song from Tina Turner.
Functioning as a kind of Mad Max meets a Spielberg adventure film with direction that feels like a precursor to the then up-and-coming Sam Raimi, the film takes Max and puts him in the role of caregiver and true hero. It works, especially once a chase sequence kicks off at the end, and is just as leather-clad and weird as the rest of the movies but in a very different, surprisingly comedic way.
4. Mad Max
Mad Max, at its heart, is a revenge film about a man named Max living sometime right before the fall of civilization. However, the revenge story doesn’t kick in until the final third of the film. It’s a very strange structure to a movie, which spends a lot of time just reveling in its own weird world of leather-filled dystopian, low-budget, truly impressive car chases. Compared to the films that followed it, it is amateur, and yet the seeds of what have made Mad Max successful are still there.
The world isn’t spoon-fed to you, there’s thought behind the crumbling society, and the action — at the time some of the best you could see — still holds up. Really, it’s just fun to watch even if you’re waiting most of the time for the story to actually happen.
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
The only film in the franchise so far to actually be directly connected to another film, Furiosa once again proves that George Miller has no interest in making the same Mad Max movie again. A bigger, longer, lore-filled installment with only a very brief cameo from Max himself, the film never reaches the pure action levels of Fury Road but is nonetheless an incredible installment in the franchise. If it falls short anywhere, it’s in not living up to the non-stop action of its predecessor, but that’s obviously not what Miller wanted to do with this movie. In the future, with the weight of expectations gone, Furiosa should only get better.
2. Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior)
The film that truly turned Mad Max into a global hit, Mad Max 2 (retitled The Road Warrior in the U.S. after the first film failed at the box office) is basically like a really good inverse version of Fury Road. With Max coming upon a group of people trapped in one of the last functioning oil refineries by Lord Humungus and his Wasteland gang, the film plays out like an apocalyptic siege with Mel Gibson’s Max as a disgruntled anti-hero.
The action is nothing short of stellar and every last bit of it is practical. The film is crammed full of the weirdness that permeates the world of Mad Max and features the villain Wex, one of the best the franchise has to offer. While it may, in retrospect, feel a bit like a practice run for making Fury Road, Mad Max 2 easily stands as a great film on its own.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
Considering the fact that one could argue that Mad Max: Fury Road could sit at the top of a ranking list of every movie ever made, it should come as no surprise it’s at the top of this list. While the other Mad Max films are all great, Fury Road is a masterpiece. Decades in the making, Miller took everything he learned from the first three films and went all in, delivering an action movie that never stops, shot nearly entirely practically, and creating a second iconic anti-hero in Furiosa. Every shot of this film is a lesson in filmmaking. Fury Road doesn’t just deliver the best Mad Max movie, it delivers the kind of cinema that defines the medium.
The above article was updated on June 1, 2024, by Matthew Razak to include in the ranking Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
