Grade: B
Starring: Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal, Shia
LaBeouf, Michael Pena and Jason Isaacs, with Alicia von Rittberg and Anamaria Marinca
as the German women
Premise: A young army clerk with no combat training is
mistakenly placed under the command of a hardened tank commander in the last
weeks of World War II.
Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, language,
disturbing images, and some innuendos
Intense. Macho. Electric. These were the main adjectives
that kept running through my head as I watched Brad Pitt’s new World War II
epic, Fury. But for one notable scene
of exception, Fury is a hard-faced,
dead-eyed, red-blooded war movie with the battlefield frankness of Saving Private Ryan or Enemy at the Gates. The main characters
are all men, who are throughout the movie almost as dirty on the outsides as
they are on the insides, haunted and twisted by the things they’ve seen and
done. They talk with grim frankness about their lives, their hopes, and even
their expectations of mortality. The battles in which they fight are
terrifying, dark, unpredictable, muddled storms of shouts and screams and
flashes and explosive projectiles. They’ve all seen things happen to the human
body that no one should ever be able to imagine.
With three major battle scenes—one of which, involving a grounded dogfight of sorts between four tanks, feels completely original and all the more terrifying for it—Fury delivers the “goods” for the war film genre. But its more fundamental aspects suffer. Surprisingly for writer/director David Ayer, who’s written a string of notably-terrific screenplays including End of Watch, Training Day, SWAT, U-571 and The Fast and the Furious, Fury is undeniably weak when it’s not on the battlefield. Its major characters are all mostly clichéd types and are sometimes hard to tell apart. Their dialogue rings of predictability and blandness. Their fates are too easy to see coming.
And then there was that one major, rather pointless scene…
Plot
By April 1945, Allied Forces had penetrated Nazi Germany’s
borders and begun encountering the dregs of the German army—including whole
divisions made up of children threatened and coerced into defense by a
desperate Nazi regime. Encountering resistance at every turn, the Allies
spearheaded their assaults with armored divisions, rolling tanks over enemy
barriers, trenches, and armies. Heading the crew of one such lumbering war
machine is Sergeant Don Collier (Brad Pitt, solid), called “Wardaddy” by his
peers and subordinates. A no-nonsense, tough-but-relatable SOB, Wardaddy is
largely revered by his tank crew, which includes a Mexican the guys call “Gordo”
(Michael Pena, sadly-underused), a religious southerner called “Bible” (Shia
LaBeouf, barely recognizable) and a greaseball hillbilly called “Coon Ass” (Jon
Bernthal, Shane from TV’s The Walking
Dead). Seasoned veterans all, the crew of the tank called “Fury” (the name
is painted in white capital letters along the barrel of the main cannon) barely
has time to mourn the loss of one member when they’re given a less-than-worthy
replacement, a clean-cut clerk/typist named Norman (Logan Lerman, very
impressive) who has only been in the Army for eight weeks. Norman’s main skill
has been typing; he’s barely even seen a gun, let alone fired one on enemy
troops, and he’s never seen the inside of a tank.
Looked on with scorn and malicious humor by the tank crew,
Norman is miserable within days, at one point begging for Wardaddy to kill him
rather then make him abuse a captured Nazi prisoner to prove his toughness. But
when a Nazi artillery raid kills some seemingly-innocent civilians in an
attempt to kill a meager handful of soldiers, Norman Norman
What Works?
As I mentioned, Fury’s
at its best on the battlefield, particularly in a late-act encounter in which
the movie’s claim that German tanks were better than American tanks seems proven
true. This scene, in which three American tanks charge a bigger, more powerful
German tank across a field and try to evade its deadly shells, is electrifying
in its breathless, brutal intensity. Its astounding cocktail of booming
cannons, barked orders, yells of pain and the shocking sight of almighty tanks
being reduced, in an instant, to a shattered metal box full of fire, raises the
hairs on the back of the neck. All of Fury’s
battle scenes are logistically straight-forward, so the geography and placement
of the major players is always easy to understand, and the scenes are
uncompromising in their brutality (the suddenness with which a man’s head is
blasted off at one point made me jump in my seat).
Though war movies tend to be more about the orchestrated
mayhem, there are almost always a few consistent characters audiences can
attach their interests to. Based as it is mostly inside a tank with a set crew
at close quarters, Fury helpfully
gives us five people who are in nearly every scene. Though Pitt gives a
rock-solid performance whose haunted edge is impressive given the actor’s
swagger in his other notable WWII film (2009’s Inglorious Basterds), the real star is the fresh-faced Lerman.
Given the plumb role of a newbie who must grow to deal with the horrors he experiences,
Lerman, for the second time this year (after March’s Noah), gives an exceptional performance of real weight, convincing
in an entire spectrum of intense emotions including sudden fits of rage and
anguish. Sometimes physically forced to do terrible things, Lerman gives the
idea of “lost innocence” in war a face. Given his two standout portrayals this
year, Lerman looks one to watch.
What Doesn’t Work?
Sadly, other than Wardaddy and Norman, the remainder of the
Fury’s crew are walking stereotypes, who are only mildly engaging even when you
can actually understand what they’re saying (due to wartime mayhem and gunfire,
large chunks of the dialogue are unintelligible). Other than one intense monologue
he’s barely visible onscreen while delivering, Michael Pena (so good in Ayer’s End of Watch) is wasted, a sad fate for
such a talented actor. LaBeouf is even worse off. And while Bernthal gets to
tear into the overripe role of a mean wartime dude (a type typically seen more
vividly in Vietnam War films), the character is written as so loathsome, it’s
sometimes hard to watch. Plus, a subsequent scene of attempted amends feels
fake. It also doesn’t feel like a coincidence or a surprise that, when the
going gets tough, his meanie is the first to die.One of the main talking points in discussions of Fury is almost certainly going to be The Scene With The Two German Ladies, a narrative-stopping head-scratcher that occurs about 45 minutes in. After helping liberate a town of hidden Nazi forces, Wardaddy notices a pair of comely women peeking through the windows of their apartment. Dragging the still wet-behind-the-ears Norman along, Wardaddy goes inside, realizes one of the women is a young, curvy, fresh-faced blonde, he prompts Norman to take her into the bedroom while he has the older provide him a bucket of water in which he can shave and wash his face. While some suspense lingers as the women nervously eye the soldiers’ guns and hear distant explosions resound outside, some time is given to showing
It’s not really that hard to understand why this scene is here. A) It gets a few women into the movie, which could potentially make the movie a bigger sell to people not in its target audience. B) Between Norman’s shape-drawing and Pena’s monologue, Bernthal’s nastiness and Pitt’s Wardaddy showing some grudging, gruff hints of chivalry, the scene was obviously seen as an opportunity to flesh out the major characters. C) It’s almost certainly meant to drive home the horror of war, how it rocks the world of helpless, harmless civilians. While it registers effectively enough on the latter two fronts, this scene borders on egregiously-funny as it runs nearly 30 minutes, becoming one of the most random and near-pointless show-stopper movie scenes since Michael Fassbender and Diane Kruger’s talky bar scene in Inglorious Basterds. But it feels undeniably forced—obviously, putting a few cutesy women near the fighting makes war seem that much worse, and with all these dirty grunts sitting in a pristine kitchen with some well-dressed hostesses, it feels and looks like some ill-tempered Jane Austen knockoff. Even if this scene manages to plumb some emotional depth, it still feels all wrong in its length and its placement—Fury, which clocks in at 134 minutes, would have been much better off as a sheer action film.
I have a few other quibbles as well—mostly on minor details:
the fates of several of the tank’s crew members strain credulity, with
false-feeling notes including a man surviving four bullets to the chest from a
sniper long enough to ruminate briefly on the nature of men in war, and another
being spared by a surprisingly-accommodating SS officer.
Content
Full of mud, blood, guts, and F-words, Fury is pretty uncompromising. It stacks up a huge body count for a
movie focusing on the exploits of five men, and it shows both the full-scale
battles and the details of gory aftermath. And, of course, the back-and-forth
dialogue is not of the Sunday School variety. Welcome to war films, folks.
Bottom Line
At its best, Fury is
one of the most captivating action films I’ve seen in the theater in some time.
It’s fierce, brutal, and epic, and it contains a pair of fine performances, by
Brad Pitt and rising-star Logan Lerman. But between some cookie-cutter
characters, some corny details and one completely needless scene of
domestic-hospitality-amidst-the-chaos, Fury
has its sputters. But it still surpassed my expectations—you’ll be hard-pressed
to stand on numb legs when this whopper is over.
Fury (2014)
Written and Directed by David Ayer
Rated R
Length: 134 minutes
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