David Ayer’s war movie features Brad Pitt as a grizzled US tank commander leading a dirty half-dozen or so sweaty, brutish but basically golden-hearted GIs into the heart of the Fatherland after D-Day, part of the Allies’ western front campaign to gain control of Germany. They’re rumbling into a world of pain, fighting field by field and hedgerow by hedgerow against an enemy now intent on defending its own territory with desperate fanaticism. The clanking, cramped tank has become home to these men, and they have christened it “Fury”: the word is daubed on its gun barrel. It sums up what they are dishing out to the Germans, and to each other.
There are dashes of both Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds – though as influences, those movies are less important than second world war-themed first-person shooter games like Call of Duty and Brothers in Arms. With its gruesome violence and gore, it certainly looks very different to a movie like Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far from 1977 on a similar subject, but with a rather loftier officer’s-eye-view. Fury is a punchy, muscular action film, confidently put together and never anything other than watchable – though closer to this director’s previous macho adventure Sabotage, and not his more thoughtful movies like End of Watch or Harsh Times. It has some pretty outrageous cliches and the attendant impression of realism is compromised in the big, central scene when the guys gather for an austere meal with some conquered civilians. It’s a sentimental moment which in terms of history and sexual politics looks about as real as a 17 Reichsmark note.
Brad Pitt himself is a figure of hard-won authority; nicknamed Wardaddy, he is a laconic veteran of the African and European campaigns and he has picked up some of the German language, learning enough to have imbibed a hatred of the Nazis, and become grimly intent on executing SS officers where they can be captured as prisoners of war – a Tarantinoesque touch. The men under his command are the sternly religious “Bible” Swan, played by Shia LaBeouf; the sweaty and truculent Grady, played by Jon Bernthal (Brad the Quaalude King from Wolf of Wall Street); the stoic Gordo, played by Michael Peña; and finally a hapless new gunner called Norman, a terrified kid played by the baby-faced Logan Lerman.
Norman has landed in their laps due to a surreal piece of bureaucratic bungling: he is a typist and office worker with no combat training. Norman’s incompetence might well get everyone killed: something to add to the fact that they are already outnumbered and outgunned by the Germans hereabouts. The awful truth that these men must face is that they will almost certainly die at the very moment of Allied victory.
Ayer makes a decent stab at summoning up the weird mixture of endless boredom and waiting in war, with nothing to do but nurse grudges and quarrels with your own comrades – punctuated with moments of exhilaration and fear. He conjures the ambient horror of trundling through the German countryside where locals have been hanged by the authorities for showing cowardice: one woman has been lynched with a sign around her neck: “I didn’t want to let my children fight”. Absolutely everyone has been pressed into military service by the Reich, and there is a sharp moment when, after narrowly winning a vicious shootout in one town, Pitt’s men come face-to-face with who they have been fighting.
The false note comes with Lerman’s character Norman, and his relationship with Wardaddy. We all know what happens to scared boys in war films, and how their character is going to change. Pitt’s character is keen to get this boy’s cherry popped, in a couple of different ways. But the combination of violent revenge with gallant sensitivity to the female civilians is naive and unconvincing.
In the end it’s a contest for underdog status, and Brad Pitt’s men seem destined for their own self-conscious Alamo or Little Bighorn showdown in the German countryside, even though it’s technically the Germans who are having their General Custer moment. Ayer gives his movie a fervour and energy which takes it beyond a videogame. But only just.
