Good, but not great - quite clumsy at times

Rating: 7/10 (23 October 2014)

Good, but not great, WW2 movie.
Written and directed by David Ayer, who gave us the brilliant End of Watch, plus the reasonably good Harsh Times, and wrote Training Day, you expect good plot, good action and, most of all, character depth. The action scenes are great - pretty much straight out of the Steven Spielberg/Saving Private Ryan/Band of Brothers school of realistic war action. Suitably gory, yet not gratuitously so.
Plot is OK, but not brilliant. Some sub-plots feel contrived and the final scenes seem overly gung ho, sentimental...and very predictable and unoriginal. Furthermore, some scenes are very clumsily done, and/or plain unnecessary. (The tank's Commander and Assistant Driver in the women's apartment was the best example of this - has me squirming the whole time and it seemed to last forever).
Moreover, the character depth Ayer built up in End of Watch is lacking here. Yes, there is some character depth, but it seems superficial. In End of Watch you ended up caring so much for both cops and couldn't imagine anything happening to them. In Fury you hardly get to know them - only the tank commander and assistant driver and then only to a limited extent. Makes you feel less engaged with regard to what happens to them.
In keeping with the lack of dimension to the characters, the performances feel a bit wooden. Brad Pitt is OK in the lead role, but his performance lacked something. Similarly, Shia LaBeouf is OK, but his character is overly stereotyped. Logan Lerman probably gives the most convincing performance of the movie, as the rookie Assistant Driver.
Overall, an exciting and entertaining movie. If more time was spent getting us to care about the characters, and less time on unnecessary, clumsy scenes, this would have been a brilliant movie.