![]() Jon Bernthal plays the growling Grady (Coon-Ass) Travis, a Neanderthal with big ears and a high-standing brush cut, his limbs askew, as if God had granted him courage but not coördination. Like Dana Andrews in this kind of movie seventy years ago, he’s an ideal leader, decisive and stoical, but with one difference: out of sight, kneeling by the side of a tank, he falls apart.Īs the driver, Trini (Gordo) Garcia, Michael Peña expands his usual persona of a blunt truth-teller, and he’s never been more likable. A natural psychologist, he draws on the strengths of each crew member to keep them all alive. But Top, a successful career warrior, is always alert. That man, who considers his life a failure, loves his sons blindly, with little idea of how to prevent his self-disappointment from spilling into punitive anger. As the Sergeant, Brad Pitt, now fifty, squares his shoulders and hardens his voice he brings the right weight to such portentous lines as “The dying’s not done, the killing’s not done.” This is a different performance from Pitt’s revelatory work as the father in Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” (2011). In this mobile prison, Ayer, working with the cinematographer Roman Vasyanov and the editors Jay Cassidy and Dody Dorn, establishes his characters and energizes his actors. The interior of the Sherman is cramped and hazardous, with steel support beams, long gear shafts, a steering wheel, and lots of other obstacles, and the men can escape only through tiny hatches. The air is the air, gravity is gravity, and when you get hit by something you’re in serious trouble. Long stretches of the movie will remain in your mind, rather than slip into the digital abyss. ![]() Ayer depends on digital special effects, but he never deviates from what could be called the illusion of reality-which, in this case, is almost hallucinatory. In this and other scenes, David Ayer, who wrote and directed the excellent cop-buddy movie “End of Watch” (2012), maintains the continuity and the coherence of space which make an action movie work emotionally for an audience. A few days later, in the most nerve-racking battle in the film, they try to scuttle around a Tiger to get a shot at its more vulnerable rear. (It was known in the Army as “the Ronson lighter”-it lit up easily when hit.) The new German Panzers, especially the Tiger II, are heavy and slow but protected with thick plate and outfitted with a long-range, armor-piercing gun.Īt the beginning of “Fury,” Top and his crew drag themselves out of their vehicle they are the only survivors in a meadow of burned-out Shermans. The four men and Collier (or Top, as the crew calls him) fight in a Sherman M4, which is fast and maneuverable but only lightly armored. With its many guns and its crushing weight, a tank destroys everything in its path-right up to the point at which enemy tanks or artillery threaten to turn it into a furnace. An extremely unpleasant irony is built into “Fury”: the Americans are a winning army, but, half-terrorized themselves, they feel like a losing army. hangs citizens who won’t join the struggle and leaves their bodies dangling from posts along the roadside. The Americans know they will triumph, but the Germans fight to defend every last acre of their homeland. In just a few weeks, the war will be over. “Fury” is literally visceral-a kind of war horror film, which is, of course, what good combat films should be. The movie’s prevailing coloring is shrouded browns and grays, mixed with clouds of white (smoke from exploding shells), bursts of flame, and the glowing flight of shells and tracer bullets. They curse, pray, and bash each other around, but the horseplay is no more than a temporary release from the grim wariness they display the rest of the time. When the men aren’t fighting, they try to come down from the nauseating exhilaration of combat. “Fury,” written and directed by David Ayer, is a genre movie, too: five guys in a tank, led by Sergeant Don Collier (Brad Pitt), fight desperate battles against the Germans, in ravaged fields and along country roads. Spielberg’s film, after its tremendous early sequence devoted to the D-Day landings, turns into a platoon movie-a grander version of the pictures made during and after the Second World War in which an ethnically (though not racially) mixed, highly individualized group of Americans (Wasp, Jew, Italian, etc.) triumphs over anonymous Fascist helots. “Fury,” a fictional account of an American tank crew fighting in Germany in April of 1945, is one of the great war movies-right near the top, within range of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and other classics. Logan Lerman, Brad Pitt, and Shia LaBeouf man a Sherman tank at the end of the Second World War, in David Ayer’s movie.
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