Exciting if flawed Second World War tank action

Rating: 7/10 (1 April 2017)

Sergeant Don 'Wardaddy' Collier is the commander of a US Sherman tank nicknamed 'Fury'; he and his crew have been in the thick of it in North Africa, Normandy and are now in Germany in the dying days of the war. Private Norman Ellison has only been in the army for eight weeks and is trained as an office typist until for some reason he is assigned to Collier's crew to replace a dead member he is definitely not ready for the terrors of war. He is certainly the outsider in the crew. As they progress through various actions he sees is baptism of fire and becomes a hardened fighter. Eventually collier is ordered to take five tanks to defend a vital crossroads; four are destroyed leaving 'Fury to defend the location then a battalion of SS turn up and one hell of a firefight ensues.
If you are looking for a war film with lots of brutal action then this is likely to be the film for you; people are decapitated; burn and are blown up. There is also the feeling that secondary characters could die at any time and as the end approaches it feels as if anybody could die. There is a problem with the characters unfortunately; early on we see Collier forcing Ellison to shoot a German prisoner and the rest of the 'hardened crew' are even less likable I almost found myself cheering for the German Tiger tank that was picking off the 'good guys'. The action scenes were intense and nicely captured some of the confusion of battle even if, as others have noted, the tracer fire looked like lasers in a sci-fi movie. The ending definitely requires one to suspend ones disbelief as hundreds of Germans take enormous casualties before they make the slightest headway against this single tank even though they have anti-tank weapons. The cast lead by Brad Pitt, in the role of Collier, does a solid job making us believe in the characters even if some of those characters are pretty hard to like. Overall I'd recommend this to fans of war films; just don't expect it to be too believable.