Good start, bad ending

Rating: 7/10 (12 January 2015)

I am not the biggest fan of Brad Pitts acting, although like Leonardo DiCaprio he's having a sense for decent roles in good movies.Or he's just in the privileged situation of choosing any role he wants. That's not different wit "Fury".
Despite the bad German title "Heart of Steel" (Retranslated) i was thrilled to see this movie. The last good anti-war movie ("The hurt locker") was released quite a while ago.
The Movie starts with well-made pictures and stereotype, but interesting characters with uniformly bad attributes. Something i expect from a good anti-war movie. Therefore the confrontation between Brad Pitt's character an the newbie along with the quiet scenes in the village are among the best scenes of the movie. Last one is also the only characterization of the German enemies.
All the action sequences in the beginning of the movie are nice to watch and seem to be quite realistic. But then everything changes.
Suddenly the whole tone of the movie is changing. From one scene to another the movie seems more like a part of the "Expandables"-Franchise. The lead characters find themselves without any reason, background or storyline in a confrontation between a enabled tank and an army of German soldiers. Although the characters have no reason or special purpose to act the way they do. Suddenly Brad Pitt and his men are doing their best Rambo-impersonation by killing German soldier with any kind of weapon. Luckily for the filmmakers all of them are dying beautifully lined up next to each other, so there is the possibility for a good shot from above.
BEGIN SPOILER: This scenario is reaching it's poor top when the German soldier are even too stupid to hit the tank with one of their rocket launchers. And when they finally do, the projectile is just going through even though in every scene before the tanks were totally destroys while forcing a similar impact. If that's not enough minutes later you see Brad Pitt's character standing on top of the tank firing without being harmed or hit. And then with the victory in reach, suddenly everyones starts dying just for dramatic reasons.
By writing these scenes the author must have thought, "Oh my god, the Germans are looking pretty bad in this". As a consequence he may have added one of the last scenes with the absurd help of one German soldier. Hopefully this should not say that he was so impressed by the American will to combat that he forget about his killed friends and fellows. I rather go with the interpretation that the young age of the character or the bad lighting was to be blamed for that. END SPOILER
CONCLUSION: After all the movie had a good first half, which was partly destroyed by a miserable but entertaining second half. In the end there should have been less what i call "America F*** Yeah!" and a bit more focusing on realism and characterization of the soldiers with their bad sides would have made this movie great. What we have instead is an entertaining movie with great optic and a bitter taste.