Grim and well made.

Rating: 7/10 (31 December 2014)

After the incredibly stupid and incompetent film Sabotage, David Ayer returns to screens only a few months later with the well crafted Fury. It's a major return to form for Ayer and this grim, gory tale of a small crew commanding a tank during the end of WWII is a worthy submission to the genre. For about the first hour, the film is all business, a relentless onslaught of one gruesome situation after another and the heavy toll it's taken on our leads. The film stumbles a bit when things quiet down for an extended sequence in a German civilian home, where getting a cooked meal turns into a difficult time, when civility is absent from most of the crew. It felt like it was inspired from the French plantation sequence that was reinstated in Apocalypse Now Redux - but the story in Fury is just too lean and small in scope to withstand a narrative detour like that. The cast is uniformly excellent, with the exception of Jon Bernthal who overplays his role as a broad cliché, who never feels human. Fury doesn't quite pull off the ending, but there's enough quality filmmaking throughout to recommend the film.