The Gritty Ozploitation action series Mad Max goes Hollywood in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, the third and least dangerous of the dystopian saga that showcases Mel Gibson’s final ascent into a bona fide movie star.

 The first two Mad Max films worked so well because (among many things) they were an outlier among the usual action fare of that time. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome showcases what happens when the maverick goes mainstream. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is not a bad film, but it lacks an edge that the previous films had. It certainly doesn’t help that the second half of the movie is essentially a version of Peter Pan set Down Under.

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome begins promising enough. Mel Gibson reprises his role of Max Rockatansky, a cop turned road warrior who is first seen aimlessly roaming the post-apocalypse wasteland of outback Australia. When he is robbed of his possessions, Max tracks his goods to a trading post called Barter Town, where he runs afoul of the town’s ruler Aunty Entity (Tina Turner.)

It is the first half of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome that is the most entertaining and memorable, with directors George Miller (the architect of the Mad Max series) and George Ogilvie (The Crossing) tapping into the quirky post-apocalypse energy of the first two Mad Max films to create an action thriller in where only the violent survive. Cue a gladiatorial battle in a caged dome where the blood-thirsty mob scream” “Two men enter; one-man leaves!”

Yet like a flower in a desert, whatever potential there was of an action classic withers and dies when Max teams up with a lost tribe of children straight out of Neverland central casting. Gibson, for his part, coasts through Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome on the strength of his movie star charisma. The casting of R&B legend Tina Turner as the main antagonist, meanwhile, feels more like a synergy marketing tactic to spruik the (admittedly good) official song “We Don’t Need Another Hero.”

What Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome needed was another rewrite. Miller by all accounts was grieving the loss of his producing partner Byron Kennedy, which is why Ogilvie was brough on to co-direct. It was a move that resulted in an unfocused affair, in which some of the highest moments in the series shares space with many of the lowest. It’s a Mad Max film with plenty of sheen yet not enough gasoline to get it over the finish line.