Fury is a WWII action movie about a tank commander and his five-man crew in the last month of the European Theater. The movie opens on a carnage filled battlefield as a Nazi officer rides through it on a white horse. Wardaddy(Brad Pitt) springs from a seemingly abandoned tank, kills the officer and frees the horse. Pitt and his crew the only surviving tank of the skirmish return to base a man down and receive fresh faced former typist Pvt Norman Ellison(Logan Lerman) as a replacement. The dirty and semi-feral crew takes to the new recruit with disdain and offers up a good amount of abuse which, of course, turns into grudging camaraderie as they trudge towards the end of the war.
The movie suffers from some of its influences, both direct and indirect, and from the legion of WWII movies that have gone before it. With Saving Private Ryan, Band Of Brothers, and even Inglorious Basterds in the not to distant past Fury offers little by comparison other than gore. The life of these soldiers in the tank is visceral and claustrophobic, we get a real sense of how tanks operated and what the machinations of tank warfare looked like, the authenticity doesn't extend further. The script piggybacks on character tropes and plot devices that are so recycled they hold no value. Even the "shocking" moments don't set it apart not only because we've seen it all before but because we're not terribly invested in any of the characters.
Pitt does too much and seems to be engaged in a constant struggle to shake of the persona and cadence of his more appealing Aldo Raine. Lerman stumbles through the movie with the same wide-eyed petulant boyish-naivte he showed as Percy Jackson and in the more recent Noah. He offers no weight or depth, when the tank crew starts to like him we don't believe it, he has shown us nothing to change their minds. The rest of the crew Bible, Gordo, and Coon-Ass(Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal) offer up gritty lived in performances which unfortunately have no real outlet.
An unoriginal piece of entertainment which those too young to have seen Saving Private Ryan may find compelling.
Rent It.
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