Has it really been almost a decade since George Miller took us all by storm by resurrecting his post-apocalyptic saga as Mad Max: Fury Road? Miller spent decades working on his 30 year-awaited sequel, and it thundered onto screen and captured the mind and hearts of fans and, shockingly, even critics! With decades to world-build, Fury Road offered tantalizing glimpses of an incredible world, whose workings Miller sketched in brisk but brilliant broad strokes. With a rumored budget of nearly $170 million, Miller’s long-gestating prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, finally hit screen this summer, tracking to be one of the biggest box-office bombs in recent memory. But evaluating a film’s financial success is not the point of a review; the point of a review is to tell you whether or not the film is any good. And with a virtually blank check budget and hefty 148 minute runtime, is Furiosa all that fans have been hoping for now that Miller is finally back behind the (digital) camera? Sadly, I have to go with “no.” Furiosa is good, but simply not good enough.

The film’s surprisingly sprawling plot involved an epic prequel narrative around the title character, Fury Road‘s central protagonist. Abducted from “The Green Place,” a paradise where females secretly hide from the ravaged post-apocalyptic wasteland where the franchise is set (fans know the drill) by leather-clad bikers, Furiosa is “adopted,” first by insane warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, so over-the-top he feels like he’s about to float out of frame) and then by the equally insane Immortan Joe. As she matures (Later played by a miscast Anya-Taylor Joy), she gets entangled in the world Fury Road only hinted at, with warring factions The Bullet Farm, Immortan Joe’s Citadel, and Gas Town, trading ammo, water, and fuel, respectively. Furiosa hits all of the expected beats, to the point where prequel-syndrome becomes it’s ultimate detriment: it’s not if Furiosa will lose her arm or become the War Rig driver of whether or not characters not in the original film will leave the narrative, it’s when, and at at 148 minutes that’s a little too long to spend on journey where the destination is never in doubt.

Furiosa‘s attempts at world-building are certainly admirable. In a world of sloppy “cinematic universes,” Miller has clearly constructed things with great care and detail, but it’s simply too much of a good thing. Whereas Fury Road started with the pedal-to-the-metal and never let up, Furiosa takes it time, often too much time, setting things up. By the time the film resorts to that oldest of “too much exposition” tropes, voice-over narration, there’s simply so much information and it feels like the film is it’s dragging its feet. Emulating Fury Road‘s rubber-in-all-four-gears-aesthetic may not have suited the film, but there’s too much languid pacing and telling us things Miller was wise to have shown in Fury Road and let the audience figure out with the imaginations. Sometimes, less really is more.

Joy is miscast in the lead role (and doesn’t show up until almost a third of the way through the film anyway), not having the raw, feral presence that Theron brought to the original version of the character, but rest of the cast acquit themselves well. Hemsworth’s nonstop scenery chewing occasionally gets as tiresome as Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris’ sometimes too overwrought dialogue (“Make it epic,” he cries at one point, and you want to tell Miller that “epic” does not mean the same thing as “long.”), but he’s an effective villain, as are the rest of the motley, grimy denizens Miller’s sandy world. But Miller has always trafficked in a kind of comic book dynamism. There’s most certainly nothing wrong with this, and virtually no filmmaker has ever captured the feel of a comic book splash page like Miller does. And there are a few dazzling action sequences; a mid-movie chase is nothing short of breathtaking. But with virtually line of dialogue pitched as ending with an exclamation point and every character a grotesque caricature, it eventually bludgeons you like an overlong heavy metal guitar solo that simply feels too loud and overbearing.

Aesthetically, the movie is everything you’d expect from a Fury Road sequel: stunning desert vistas, roaring IMAX sound-mixed full-throttle action, dazzling cinematography, striking images, and breathless action. Undoubtedly, no one has a feel for vehicular mayhem like Miller ever has, but the movie stalls too often, never achieving the exposition-on-the-run style it clearly clearly aspires towards. There’s the propulsive design somewhat vaguely reminiscent of Japanese anime-indeed, Last Exile, Blue Submarine No.6, and Escaflowne designer Mahiro Maeada was one of the film’s concept artists. But while these elements work-the action can be breathtaking, the designs are striking, the character moments emotional-these things can’t cohere due to the movie’s fundamental pacing issues. In the end, it’s a fascinating victory for fans that Miller was given the chance to play in and expand his fascinating world, but the most disappointing part isn’t the the box office failure like means we’ll never see the long-awaited future Mad Max sequels that I want as much as anyone, but that Furiosa itself simply never lives up to its potential.