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Gibson was angry. Hardy is mad.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) may be the maddest Mad Max yet, with an updated Max (Tom Hardy) who is not the revenge-fueled cop of prior films, but a broken-down shell of his former self, haggard and alone after the events of his earlier life that have pushed his emotional torment. The film has been called a sequel and a reboot, but director George Miller referred to it as more of a “revisiting,” using an old character in an updated environment with a vastly different emotional state.

Tom Hardy’s and Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky share the same name, but they are not the same man. Brian Tallerico writes, “Miller’s new version of Max isn’t a warrior. Rather, he’s a man driven by the memories of past sins to do little more than survive.”

Fury Road is one of those rare follow-up films that outperforms its source material, made even rarer as it is the fourth in line. The occasional flashback to Max’s past comes and goes, but these controlled glimmers do little more than let the viewer know this guy has lost everything. The details of Max’s history are treated with indifference, allowing the Max of Fury Road to operate on his own and with no need to understand his past.

Given the length of time it has been since the previous Max films (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third film in the franchise, came out in 1985), evolving Max’s character is a smart movie for modern audiences. Miller and Hardy created a character that would feel familiar to fans of Gibson’s Max, but allow those entering the franchise anew to accept Hardy’s Max without feeling uninformed.

Tom Hardy (as well as co-star Charlize Theron) perform through nuanced looks and scowls more than dialogue. The New Yorker jokes, “You could tattoo the entirety of Max’s dialogue onto his biceps,” but the jest is pretty spot-on. Just as with audiences unfamiliar with Max prior to Fury Road, Furiosa’s origin story goes untold during the film. It isn’t necessary to know how she rose to prominence within Immortan Joe’s (Hugh Keays-Byrne) hierarchy, what matters is what we see in the film. This sense of immediacy and urgency drives the characters and their arcs throughout the picture, told mostly through visual imagery instead of dialogue.

“He’s living in a world where language is not recreational,” the director says. “You don’t say anything unless you have to.”

When Max speaks in Fury Road, he does so with action. There are entire scenes almost completely free of dialogue, but which play like conversations. When Max first happens upon Furiosa and the wives, he commands them around and works to free himself from his chains through the pointing of guns, the elocution of grunts, and the conversational power of intense glaring. That is the type of Max we see in Fury Road—one so overwhelmed by years in the wasteland, he, like many of the film’s characters, has become animalistic and primitive. He’s been through the ringer and he’s done with it. He is the survivor, and everyone else he has known is dead. That does things to a person, and the result is what Tom Hardy brings to the film.