Grade: B

Rating: 7/10 (7 November 2014)

Fury opens with the calm before the storm: a quiet battlefield at sunset. A single German officer rides his horse through a series of fallen tanks, destroyed at the end of battle. As he calmly rides through, a character by the name of "Wardaddy", played by Brad Pitt, leaps from one of the tanks and brutally murders the officer, then quietly returns to his tank with his three other living officers, and one deceased.
I wish the film was punctuated with more moments like this; Fury is an aptly-named film that almost never lets up. It is packed with entertaining action sequences, and not much else. Characters are horribly underdeveloped; aside from our two leads, who had no back story, I knew nothing about the other characters. They are played to the fullest by their respective actors, but we never learn enough to truly determine the motivation of their behaviors, or even to care much about them. The only characters that get any real attention are Wardaddy and Norman (played by Logan Lerman in the only non-convincing performance of the film); and still, we get no back story for them either.
In addition to not being given any inkling of what might be driving the character's motivations, we get no real motivation for the story either. Norman is introduced to war-torn Germany, and he does not fit in. We know the film is going to revolve around the relationship between him and the other men of "Fury", but there is no foreground story- no mission or destination guiding their journey. The tank rolls around a lot, but where is it going? With what purpose? Wardaddy tells a young German woman at one point "we're going to the next townand the nextand the nextuntil you people quit." Is that it? It makes the movie feel aimless. Maybe there's something I'm missing here. I hope that's the case.
There are a few other issues with the film. The fired shots in the film look like something out of a Star Wars film. I'm not sure what they were going for here but it was awfully distracting. The writing for Norman is not believable either, and might be the reason for Logan Lerman's acting not seeming seemingly weak performance. The rest of the actors do well because they are all experienced actors who know what they were doing- Jon Bernthal in particular has made great strides, and I wanted to see more him; a sense of the director's presence is not present here. The film is both generic and specific- the muddy, gray atmosphere of Germany is a specific look done to death in WWII films).
Although Fury misses a lot of its marks, it is not a bad movie. The action sequences are entertaining, in particular, a scene where three American tanks take on a German Tiger tank. It is one of the most memorable scenes from a war movie I've seen in a long time. There are lots of powerful little moments throughout, and the gore of the film, though meant to shock, is not photographed in such a way to elicit such a reaction; it is cold and straightforward, to show us exactly how things are in war. There's another great scene in a German town, one of the quieter and more focused scenes of the film, involving Wardaddy, Norman, and two German women, which bounces back and forth from heartfelt to tense, over and over again.
However, by the end, I felt I had learned nothing, took away nothing from the film. Sadly, Fury is nothing but more than it's title. There is no point, and if there is something nuanced to take away from here, it fails to show at all. Fury is an entertaining two hours, but ultimately forgettable, and in a few years, will probably be referred to as "that other WWII movie Brad Pitt starred in, the one that wasn't 'Inglorious Basterds'." I was a little disappointed, and unimpressed.
Grade: B