Good film but Brian May's score is horrifically bad. It works a little better in TRW but it's one of the worst i've ever heard here.

Aside from the melodramatic score, and problems with character development and bad dialogue acting, the biggest problem for me, that made it go from, possibly, "bad, but entertaining in parts" to "laughably bad" was the dystopia itself. Australia must really be, as a BBC article put it, "Sweden with sunshine" (i.e. very law-abiding) if Australians think this is what the breakdown of law and order would actually look like. Now, I have actual experience of living in places where the rule of law is feeble and I found the Mad Max dystopia frankly ridiculous. For example:
-Seemingly, everyone has guns except the outlaws (most of them, most of the time, at any rate), so that an old lady with a shotgun, instead of being killed on sight, can boss them around.
-Roads are in mint condition, even ones that are supposed to be off-limits and, of course, the powers that be trust that people will obey a sign instead of actually physically blocking access.
-Max and his family travel as if they were taking a holiday in Switzerland.
-Nobody, it seems, makes the least effort to surround property with a masonry wall or at least barbed wire, or has dogs, or anything that will at least warn of intruders or delay them, even in the absence of neighbours, and the woods are considered a perfectly safe place to wonder off alone and unarmed.
-The near-breakdown of law and order seems to have no economic effects whatsoever - Max, who is an honest cop (no income from bribes or extorsion or, for that matter, hit jobs) and isn't police chief or anything, has a nice, spacious house, even though his wife doesn't seem to have job or any source of income, and they have a kid. There's no sign of economic worries, and not just in the case of Max. You don't see kids lying on their bare backs on shards of glass to beg for money (which, yes, I've actually seen in the real world) or anything.
This is so true so trueI agree and this movie is beyond stupid and retarded and I cant understand how this poor crap movie is considered a masterpiece or even cult classicthese things you mention is just only some small parts of all the stupidity in this crap movie.its like a bad school project in my opinion, even though I loved it as kid in the early 80s when I saw it the first time but today as an adult, this movie is nothing but a big joke, even though Mel is a really good actor even in his first movie.
~If the realistic details fails, the movie fails~

70'S DUDE, 7O'S.

it all looks made of plastic. cars, people, houses, flowers, everything looks like it's made of plastic.

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gangs of bikers terrorizing everyone who dares drive out of the city, even in broad daylight
Australia is one of the most urbanised nations in the world. If a few dozen farmers were being bothered by bikies, I'm not sure that a short-staffed police force would make it a priority.

"If you ain't a marine then you ain't beep

But even if law and order haven't broken down completely, part of the film's premise is that there are gangs of bikers terrorizing everyone who dares drive out of the city, even in broad daylight, and that the police have failed to stop them, and that the police itself just barely abides by the law (the police chief doesn't care if the cops break the law as long as it's out on the road, and he can barely keep say, Goose from killing the biker in cold blood). It may not be total, 28 Days Later type societal breakdown, but the premise is that the rule of law is pretty feeble and it's a pretty violent society. That premise and the things I noted just don't match - each on its own could be credible, but not together.

I've always taken this to be the beginning of the breakdown of law, not the total collapse of society. So, it's like the day after the day after type thing. So, all 'structures' are still in place, but the police are poorly funded and so stretched too thin.
I think the trouble is that Mad Max2 is so clearly different. So, a lot of crap happens between 1&2 that we don't see. 1 is semi-dystopian (like what our world may have been like in the early '80's if things had gone a little bad, and 2 is early post-apocalyptic where the same causes as the breakdown in 1 leads to a global nuclear war in the period between 1&2.
As an Aussie, I could definitely see Toecutter's gang being exactly right for that time. Not now of course, probably all criminals would have at least a handgun now, but back then, yeah I wouldn't be surprised if only a few did.