David Ayer gives us two films in one

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2014)

Brad Pitt and the Second World War. What's not to like? Even if, now 50, Pitt really is too old to play a front-line soldier. And the movie is rightly proving a huge commercial success. But haven't we seen all this sort of stuff before, most obviously in "Inglourious Basterds"? Well, yes and no - "Fury" does have some distinctive features.
First, it is not often that war films focus on the tank as weapon. The best example was "Lebanon" and, although a good deal of "Fury" is located within the soldiers' vehicle, the Israeli film was shot entirely within the confines of a tank. A major difference between the two films though is that, in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, they faced no heavy weaponry whereas, in "Fury", we see the the US Army's standard armoured weapon, the M4 Sherman medium tank, facing the much better-armoured German Tiger tank and a sequence when four Shermans lock horns with one Tiger is one of the most viscerally thrilling of the movie.
But there are other differences too. The Second World War is usually presented as the nearest we've had to a 'good' war: we know who is the evil invader and who is the noble liberator, who commits war crimes and who acts with unfailing decency. Except that "Fury" does not flinch from showing Americans behaving badly, even murderously. A final difference - which adds a certain poignancy to the film - is that it is set in Germany in the final days of the war when the Germans have no reason to keep fighting and the GIs just want to stop killing and go home.
All these elements of "Fury" are the result of the writer and director being David Ayer for whom this is a very personal movie. Both of his grandfathers fought in the Second World War, he himself is a US Navy veteran who served on a nuclear submarine, and he has made a career out of telling stories about men losing their innocence (think "Training Day and "End Of Watch"). In the case of "Fury", the innocent character is Norman (Logan Lerman), a clerk suddenly forced to be a gunner, who comes under the unconventional guidance of tank commander Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Pitt). The other three crew members are a mixed bunch of veterans played by Shia LaBeouf ("Bible'), Michael Peña ("Gordo"), and Jon Bernthal ("Coon-Ass").
At so many levels, this is an outstanding work. The direction, the cinematography and the sound are superb, while the vast crew who made the Herfordshire and Oxfordshire countryside of rural England look like the war-blasted Germany have done a terrific job. Ultimately, though, this is two films presented as a single adventure. For the first two- thirds of the movie, we have a traditional 'war is hell' approach. Then, when the tank called "Fury" loses its track, we lurch into another kind of film altogether, one in which 'fury' becomes an adjective rather than a noun, one that recalls the final body-fest in the conclusion to "The Wild Bunch", one in which war may be hell, but damn it, it's also incredibly exciting and oh so heroic.