Fury. Written and directed by David Ayer. Starring Brad Pitt and Logan Lerman. Rating: 8 (out of 10)
Fury isn't Inglourious Basterds: there's no cheeky banter while Nazis get scalped. Fury isn't Bridge on the River Kwai, either, because it's not hopeful enough for whistling.
David Ayer's Fury is a stark, unrelentingly grim take on war from the perspective of a Sherman tank manned by a crew who is dismally outgunned as the German army makes their last, desperate stand at the end of the Second World War.
The striking opening shot is of a man on horseback at a distance, ambling through the mist. It's no pastoral idyll, however: the ground reveals itself to be muck, strewn with bodies and burning machinery, and the man wears the unmistakable garb of a German SS officer.
In 1945 the Germans were losing the war, and they knew it. Every man, woman and child was recruited to fight the Allied forces. Those who didn't were hanged as warning to others.
Sgt. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) is commander of a tank dubbed Fury. He and his men have been together for years but have suffered a fresh loss. Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) arrives as the team's newest, greenest recruit, having only been on the job eight weeks. Norman shouldn't even be here: he's a clerk typist and has no tank training. "That's your home," says the Sarge, pointing at the tank. "Do as you're told, don't get too close to anyone." Norman's first job is to clear a man's brains off the tank's walls.
It's immediately clear that the men have seen too much, and killed too often, already. It's a wonder any of them came back whole. Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf) keeps semi-sane by trying to save souls before they expire on the battlefield. "Gordo" Garcia and Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis (Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal) trade barbs and women, when they can get them.
Norman's inexperience is a liability, and the sergeant has less than a day to teach him how to pull the trigger and kill Nazis before they all end up dead. It's a coming- of-age war story with a quick maturation curve.
The quiet moments in the tank are perhaps the scariest (if you thought men were safe in those contraptions, think again). A pall of impending doom never leaves, as the guys trundle from one ridiculously close call to the next, knowing the war is almost over but that they'll likely never see peacetime.
There's a brief respite in the film's middle when the Allies take back a German town and Sarge and Norman find a local woman and her cousin hiding in an apartment. The foursome share a meal - and more - until the rest of Fury's men barge in and get violent, then sad, then violent again. An unlikely scenario? Maybe. But credit goes to Ayer for making a dinner conversation as tense as any of his battle scenes.
Ayer is the man behind End of Watch, Training Day (which he wrote) and Street Kings, all of which focus on tough friendships forged in tough circumstances. He creates a bond between these characters, but not an overly sympathetic one. We don't need to know each character's story, whom they left back home: the grit and gore of how over 60 million people died is the point here. A spare, unromanticized score by Steven Price only heightens the gravity of the men's circumstances.
The agony depicted in the film is the reason the real men who saw action in places like the Battle of the Bulge and the Normandy invasion returned home and never spoke a word about the war. Before 24-hour cable news and the Internet, wives and civilians had no real idea of what occurred "over there:" it was a solder's dark secret. Fury is one of those films where after viewing it, we finally get it.
