Are we furious yet?

Rating: 5/10 (19 October 2014)

There are some outstanding war films out there, and I wanted so badly to have "Fury" become another one of them. Two hours later, I felt disappointed that here was this big budget movie that fails to give us a coherent account or depiction of what was supposed to be a couple of days in the middle of hell.
First the good: Brad Pitt believes in his character and doesn't fail to embody the spirit of the traumatized leader who has seen his faith and beliefs shaken more than a few times. There's the neophyte (Logan), a young man literally dumped as the action is turning crazier and bloodier. There is the squad of hardcore men who can't seem to find goodness anywhere despite what comes out of their mouths. Le Beouf hangs on the believe some higher being will keep him going, but his eyes are listless. The token minority doesn't seem to have much of a vocabulary or a point of view. Pena is wasted here. There is the soldier who has lost the ability to feel compassion and has become a shell of a being, with nothing resembling a soul in him. Of course, we have a beautifully reenacted scenery full of rotting bodies, wounded and dying men, with fog machines working full time to give it the proper atmosphere. Impeccable visual and special effects and some good make up creations.
However, both the screenwriter and the director (who happen to be the same person) appeared to have gone AWOL or have been the victim of a crazy American or German sniper. It really doesn't matter who because it feels like the camera was left running and the actors appear lost most of the time. Nothing really comes together. The dialog is weak at best, there seems to be no rhythm for the flow of the story (which is very thin to say the least), and this is too bad because the expected range of emotions never comes through. Oh yes, there are the required excessive amount of cussing as heads are blown up, imminent danger happens, or hell breaks loose, but it's hard to connect it to anything since it seems the editor has become victim of some kind of chemical agent the troops have been exposed to, but it's not the characters that feel the effects, but the members of the audience, as movie editing goes up in smoke, and we really don't get to appreciate the beautiful horrors of what other films have given us in the past.
Here we yearn for the constant fear that Scott conjured in "Black Hawk Dawn", for the madness of "Full Metal Jacket", a movie that is both intense and too constricted, but that has some kind of focus. We start wondering where the muses that inspired the battles of "Private Ryan", "Braveheart", and even the flawed "Alexander" have gone. Even less popular films like "Hamburger Hill" managed to terrify, disgust, and sicken us. There are moments we beg for Stone to step in and give us some of the psychological and physical shadows of death and despair. We want the self-discipline of Eastwood who knows how to make quiet a stifling force, a prelude to even more hellish moments. There is humanity in those films. In here it makes a brief appearance in a scene where people regain a semblance of humanity that is quickly shattered by some members of the heroic fury troop.
It's not a complete mess, but a film that needed some more intervention, some more trimming, some more editing to use the elements that give a more complete picture of what the original goal is. We get the drift and cry when the tragic end arrives because we know it's going in that direction, but we also fear that it never gets there because it never feels like we are in the middle of a German field in 1945.