Strong performances and special effects pick up the slack of this schnooze-fest.

Rating: 6/10 (24 April 2018)

This movie really shows how well Brad Pitt has aged as an actor over the years. He and Shia LeBeof really give great performances that add to the suspense. Brad Pitt is a laser-focused combat officer with a certain vinegar-laced personality, and Shia LeBoeuf plays a religiously inclined main gunner who is perhaps his second-best soldier.
This story moves along too slowly for my taste. There's alot of stopping and starting in the action, and at least one scene we see in every war movie: soldiers bust in to someone's home and take advantage of their food supply and recharge their batteries. One of the crew has a romantic relationship with a German girl in the home he busts into. It might be a real experience in war but I think I've seen it one too many times.
The one thing you WON'T get in this movie is any sort of epic tank battles such as made the theatre of the Atlantic Campaign famous. The movie starts out inside the tank after a mission, and the forward machine gunner is killed; all you see is his bloody neck stump and spine sticking out which is graphic.
I reduced one star because this movie has moments where the action isn't that great. In a couple of scenes guys are getting blown up everywhere, and in real life there would be grunts and cries for mommy and, well, internal organs lying everywhere, but in this movie they clean it up too too much. I heard that the insides of those Sherman tanks looked like slaughterhouses at the end of a mission! There is the one crew member who gets a Panzerfaust rocket cut straight through his abdomen, but very little guts and grizzle are seen! Another guy leans into a German grenade, but again, there should be blood everywhere, but there isn't!!!!!
There's alot of German language in this movie. As having taken four years of high school German, I can appreciate that part of it. But still, this movie's setting takes place later in the Atlantic Campaign, so there's really often times no direction in this. Very much feels like the film stops where it starts and starts where it stops. There are a few tank battles but are so brief that you tend to get bored.
Also, the German gunners in that one scene are firing into the tanks, and miss three times in a row!!! No way that is true; I happen to know that the Germans were reknowned for their accuracy and the Sherman was an easy target.