Fury: Movie review

The last time we saw Brad Pitt hunting for Nazis, he was the fun guy with a Southern drawl who leads a squad of killers in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. This time around, he is a serious, stern sergeant popularly known as Wardaddy, commanding a tank with a diverse quartet. There's a reluctant soldier, Norman (Logan Lerman of Perks of Being a Wallflower), a god-fearing gunner (Shia LaBeouf), an uncouth loader (Jon Bernthal) and, for diversity's sake we think, a Mexican-American driver (Michael Pena). Devastation happens yet again, but there are few laughs and more dead bodies on the way.

In Fury, death lurks at every corner. War converts even the innocent into merciless killers evident in the film's finest track which follows Norman, a typist suddenly expected to be a soldier. The rookie Norman is the audience's eye to the bloody battlefield. He has never been inside a tank or held a gun. Lerman does a fine job highlighting the emotional trauma of the war on the soldiers. He is the man in uniform who cries and screams. It is up to Wardaddy, taking his name a tad seriously, to become a father figure to Norman. There are lessons on how to kill, lectures on the harsh realities of war, and even an order to make love to a young woman. Soon Norman earns the nickname Machine. Meanwhile, Wardaddy's rocky exterior reveals a soft, vulnerable heart.

Obviously, the Americans are the good guys. They don't plunder or attack women as they conquer German towns in the final days of World War II. Here, German women enjoy the soldiers' attention and after initial hesitation sleep with them. Prettiness doesn't survive for long in Fury. A young woman smiles coyly and the next minute her dead body is spotted in the bricks.

Fury is no-holds-barred action drama. It is not for the faint-hearted. A soldier shoots himself than suffer a painful death. Young kids are shown firing guns. Dead bodies hang from houses or are spread across fields. Survival is crucial and it only comes at the cost of eliminating others, often brutally. As Wardaddy and company go about shooting everything in sight, Fury begins to feel like a video game. One waits for the moment when the band of brothers runs out of ammo and becomes one of the many in the rising body count.

That moment arrives when the five US soldiers now with a broken tank are confronted with a battalion of 300 SS soldiers. By now you know that Wardaddy isn't the sort to run away from a fight and desert his tank. The subsequent result, a noisy spectacle, comes at a heavy price. If you know the WWII history, then you know how it ends.

The actors do a commendable job with both Pitt and LaBeouf as standouts. But the heart of the film is Lerman, whose eyes speak volumes as they take in the incessant violence. What's the point of it? Who is a hero and who a villain? With the aid of cinematographer Roman Vasyanov, Ayer shows the nerves, the camaraderie and the energy in the claustrophobic space of a tanl.

While Fury never lulls, it also doesn't surprise as a war drama, its emotional range rather limited. Nonetheless, the film is a hard reminder that with war leaves many scars, both seen and unseen.