Fury Flounders

Rating: 5/10 (31 May 2015)

The WWII film genre is dying. Actually, the entire "war movie" genre is dying. Nothing says Hollywood desperation like a WWII tank movie with little else to say besides "War is hell, kids." Apparently, this is the first film to use an authentic German Tiger I tank in its production. This will probably remain FURY's only notable distinction as the years pass.
I initially resisted the notion that FURY would be a letdown. After all, Brad Pitt has given a string of admirable performances in the last six years, including INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, which managed to subvert and enliven the war movie genre more successfully than any in recent memory. I was also intrigued by the prospect of Logan Lerman making a departure from his typically subdued fare (see PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER). Not to mention, director David Ayer, of TRAINING DAY renown, sealed the deal for me because I had so enjoyed his 2001 Academy Award winning film. I expected FURY to be as punchy and challenging as TRAINING DAY, but this was a mistaken assumption.
FURY boredly belabors you with every 'shocking' war movie convention in the book. You name it, they got it: civilian casualties, callous slaughters, graphic violence (exploding heads and blasted limbs alike), dehumanization of the enemy, brave, improbable stands, the 'war is a drug' cliché, and the oh-so-familiar progression from innocence to experience. As for plot, FURY seems to deliberately deny any opportunity to find a reason behind the carnage, which might have been an effective strategy had Ayer made this a miniseries.
Which brings me to my greatest grievance with the film. So many of FURY's problems stem from the brevity of its narrative. Over no more than a handful of days, we observe young Lerman's transformation from an inept typist to a gung-ho Nazi hater unflinchingly gunning down hordes of Germans. Accelerated, stilted characterization plagues Lerman's admittedly impassioned performance. There seems to be little to no transition from Lerman the coward to Lerman the killer, and no time for him to grow on the rest of the crew, who warm to him at an unbelievable rate. Had the events of the film been stretched over ten hours, Ayer could have achieved more conviction in the bonds between the brothers in arms, more catharsis at the conclusion. As it stands, FURY is ludicrously contrived because of how quickly everything progresses.
The sole exception to this observation is an extended sequence between Pitt, Lerman, and two German women which creates a catastrophic hiccup in the film's pacing. It also makes for some extreme awkwardness, as Lerman finds himself a fifteen minute lover in the form of a somewhat-unwilling, somewhat-inviting German civilian girl. It's hard to say what Ayer felt he accomplished with this sequence: the women are unfortunately submissive, and the men aggressively misogynistic. Ayer makes no attempt to rationalize why these women are so accommodating, or why Pitt's seemingly upright character would torture these women with a simultaneously foreboding and unthreatening set of gestures. Why keep his men from raping the women if he turned a blind eye to Lerman's fling behind closed doors? The explanation might be as simple as "war is hell." War changes people. And if that's all Ayer had to say, he could have completely eliminated the scene and lost nothing. In an attempt to remark on the moral ambiguity of the American soldiers, Ayer jeopardized my sympathies in his protagonists and disrupted the flow of his film, which was already bland.
I would say that FURY should have been better, but it would probably be more accurate to concede that FURY is what it is: a ham-handed retread (pun intended) of the familiar formula of grit, horror, loss, disillusionment, and redemption that so many better films have already defined. Ayer's vision of war is stultifying monotony, interrupted by the occasional burst of ludicrousness. If you're looking to see a workmanlike Pitt performance, you could do worse, but don't expect to be surprised or impressed by FURY.