Awful, predictable rubbish

Rating: 3/10 (14 November 2014)

Without being facetious at all, the only worth while moment in this film was Brad Pitt taking his shirt off and revealing that yes, at 51, he's still got it.
The rest of the film was an endurance test through some of the worst 'frat boy' dialogue I've ever heard. If you took the words "pv$$y, "motherfv*ker" and "Nazi scum" out of the script, you'd pretty much be left with some bible quotes and a few lines of Brad Pitt speaking atrocious German.
Characters shout, cuss and antagonize each other to an aggravating degree. The story arc is so predictable you will have figured out who's going to die in the end after the first 15 minutes. The pacing is arduously bloated in parts, most notably during a sequence involving the film's only two female characters. It drags out for what seems like 20 minutes during which very little is said, but has plenty of pointlessly awkward tension that amounts to nothing.
I was at least expecting to be entertained by some explosive action, but the battle sequences were disappointingly dull, repetitive and messily edited. Also some of the post-production effects were rather cheap; the bullet rounds looked like laser fire from the Starship Enterprise.
Worst of all for me was the director's failure in his obvious attempt to impart emotional weight to all the flagrant violence. We see glimpses of the crew's frailty beneath the veneer of bravado, but it all feels so forced. Shia LaBeouf spends the majority of his screen time with a puffy frog-eyed expression as if he's constantly on the verge of tears. Bible verses are recited, violins surge, people are blown apart like shredded pork, yet I never felt impassioned by any of it, and kept thinking how Spielberg did it so much better in 'Saving Private Ryan'.
Performance wise, Logan Lerman's character is the only one who generates any sympathy. Brad Pitt talks in that same fake-sounding 'Muurican' accent he adopted for "Inglorious Basterds". It sounds strained, like a teenager trying to seem gruffer than he is. The other two mutts are clearly meant to be annoying and antagonistic, but their 'redemption' doesn't come early enough, and I was honestly willing them to die sooner rather than later.
All in all, I cannot understand how "Fury" garnered such positive reviews. It's undeniable that compared to the many great war movies from which it borrows, it is definitely on the lower tier.