Maybe I'm just not enough of a film connoisseur but I just watched Fury Road last night and thought it was mediocre. Sure the action was okay and it was cool how you just started with the action but the storyline seemed superficial at best and I felt like the climax came way too late in the film.
A lot of what's good about the film's wrapped up in technical film-making appreciation. The remarkable quality of the action-storytelling, how "legible" the action is, the quality of both those things despite the by-modern-standards limited use of CG, how good the practical effects themselves are, the costuming and set-building and world-realization stuff, simple efficiency and competence at "set-up, pay-off" screenwriting (less common than it should be, especially in flashy action movies), that kind of thing.
[EDIT] Basically, I think there are three general viewer-categories for the film, here presented as their reactions:
1) "It had lots of action. Seemed like normal action in an action movie, I guess. Hated the story and characters. Movie sucked overall, don't get why people like it."
2) "The action was notably good. I can't explain why, but it was definitely good. Film overall was just OK. Liked it fine, some stuff about it was neat, but don't get why some people are raving about it."
3) "Oh my god I'm going to need several days and pages of notes to unpack everything that was great about the action and storytelling, and especially the two of those together, in that movie. There's so much to cover. I can't wait to be able to watch it at home so I can analyze the editing more closely, that's going to be great. A+."
Agreed 100%, perhaps the most impressive thing about the movie is how economical it is with storytelling and worldbuilding. Think about the fact that it is largely just fantastic action set pieces and incredible visuals. The consider how much you understand the world and characters within it. A lesser movie would have a 10-minute exposition dialog scene early on, telling you in excrutiating detail exactly what Immortan Joe is doing and why he is bad. Fury Road is the absolute pinnacle of "Show, don't tell" for me.
Then there's the niche category (cannot speak for Fury Road, but can speak for, among others, True Lies):
"Wow, putting a reel transition there is BRAVE." (yep, that's a multi-projector projectionist reaction, True Lies has a reel-to-reel transition in the middle of a conversation, and you have up to "seconds" of lost frames in a switch-over).
