FURY – The Review

‘Fury’ is the nickname of vehicle at the center of FURY, a Sherman tank – the formidably efficient warhorse of the American army during WWII. FURY is a harrowing, tightly focused combat unit tale set during the war’s waning days that is at its best during its many bloody and intense battle sequences. The story is set during the Allies’ final ground assault on the Third Reich. Fury’s five-man crew is led by Sgt. Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt), a seasoned tank commander with the 2nd Armored Division who’s seen it all. In spring of 1945, Collier finds him and his crew deep in hostile Germany where, although faced with certain defeat, the Nazis intend to fight to the death. FURY opens just after the death of one of its crew. His replacement is Norman (Logan Lerman), a green, conscience-stricken clerk trained “to type 60 words a minute” (it’s never well-explained how he ends up in the tank). The rest of the team is Scripture-spouting “Bible” (Shia LaBeouf), Spanish-spouting driver “Gordo” (Michael Pena) and rapey neanderthal mechanic “Coon-Ass” (Jon Bernthal). Fury and its crew are part of a tank squadron that doesn’t seem to have any real mission aside from rolling into German villages and wiping out remaining enemy soldiers. The story’s exciting if unlikely climax has Fury broken down with several hundred marching Nazis closing in. This episodic structure mostly works, making for plenty of sweaty male bonding as well some surprises such as when a superior-powered German tank pops out of nowhere, wiping out the rest of the fleet and leaving Fury the sole survivor.

FURY is extraordinarily violent. Director David Ayer leaves nothing to the imagination regarding the brutality of war and the carnage some weapons are capable of. The battle scenes, using real vintage WWII tanks, are superbly executed, not only from a practical effects perspective, but in the way that Ayer keeps us on the edge of our seats. Less successful are the quiet stretches between the battles – scenes that don’t amount to much. There’s a prolonged dinner-table sequence that finds Collier and Norman spending some peaceful moments with a pair of surviving German women in a bombed-out town that takes a long time to go nowhere. A short-lived romance between Norman and the pretty German girl Emma (Alicia Von Rittberg) is shoehorned in for no reason but to illustrate how tragic and dehumanizing War is. The acting is fine, especially a commanding Pitt as Collier, but the characters are stereotyped to the point where you know exactly who’s doomed and in what order. As Norman, the young green recruit, Lerman is such a baby-faced innocent you just know he’ll find a way to buck the odds and survive. There’s a terrific early scene where Collier cruelly forces a stammering Norman to shoot a Nazi prisoner in the back, but this young character predictably goes from “I couldn’t shoot – they were just kids” to “Fucking Nazis!” in calculable time. Pena and Bernthal aren’t given much room to develop their characters but still manage fine, physical performances and despite a big-boy moustache, Shia LaBeouf is miscast as he always is in any movie meant to be taken seriously. I would like to have seen more about the desperate, dangerous and exacting job of manning a tank. While I did get a good sense of the camaraderie and trust among these virtual siblings I never got a feeling for the details of being in a tank crew or the sense of claustrophobia that I got with something like DAS BOOT or, even more appropriately, the outstanding but forgotten 1988 film THE BEAST starring Jason Patrick about a Russian tank crew trapped in Afghanistan.

While it may not have exceeded my high expectations, FURY is a good, old-fashioned war film and is recommended.

4 out of 5 Stars