Nearly every war movie, no matter how honest its intentions, runs into the same problem at a certain point in its narrative. You can show war in all of its brutal honesty and paint in shades of grey, but there’s going to come a point where your film has to showcase battle instead of its aftermath, and cinema being the visceral means of depiction it is, these sequences become action sequences bereft of nuance. The best directors will imbue these sequences with such rousing efficiency that you’ll temporarily be swept up into the binary furor of battle, but it has the effect of diminishing the work done to put a human face on the battle. Fury, the latest WWII action picture, is the latest to succumb to this pitfall (or should I say Pittfall). While writer/director David Ayer proves himself eminently capable of shooting electric scenes of tanks in battle, these moments rob the film of the character development and genuine pathos generated in its quieter moments.
We join the occupants of the Sherman tank codenamed Fury (Shia LaBeouf, Michael Pena and Jon Bernthal all led by Brad Pitt as a sergeant known as “Wardaddy”) in the immediate aftermath of losing their co-driver and every other member of their battalion to a costly battle. Soon thereafter, fresh-faced Norman (Logan Lerman), a typist who has never fired a gun or seen battle in paired with this battle-worn, tight-knit family (his first act as a member of this unit is to remove the viscera and partial unblinking face left behind by its previous occupant), and it isn’t surprising that these hardened men don’t take kindly to this interloper.
Where this all is leading (a desperate last stand with their stalled tank having to turn back a SS squadron nearly 300 strong) would mean more if we were given time to understand these characters. Instead, we get the impression that these fine actors have clearly spent time turning these characters into lived-in human beings, but we’re never privy to that hard work. There is a sequence in which Pitt’s Wardaddy (who has taken a paternal liking to Norman, although it might just be an act of self-preservation) takes Lerman’s character to an impromptu encounter with two German women (Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg, providing powerful work) that is interrupted by the rest of their crew that points toward a better version of this movie. It is tender and horrifying in equal doses, and reveals more of each of these characters (Pitt in particular plays a character so taciturn, that this sequence is about all we’re given) than the other hour and forty minutes combined.
Which is a shame because David Ayer does fine work in establishing the queasy normalcy of war. His camera captures the gruesome everyday banality of combat with a matter-of-fact straightforwardness – so much so that if the character development was equally adroit this would be a truly formidable picture. Whether it’s a nurse casually throwing aside a basin filled with blood as the camera tracks past or a tank rolling over a corpse that has clearly experienced this many times before, this is a film that trains us to compartmentalize these atrocities much in the way its characters have to: the simple cost of doing business. There isn’t much in the way of new ground being paved by Ayer here, even if he makes the ‘war is hell’ motif more immediate with this willingness to traffic in the gruesome. He is a filmmaker primarily concerned with the very masculine bonds formed by people entrenched in battle (be they police officers, DEA agents or soldiers) and is effective at rooting around the unsavory actions such camaraderie can engender. And while what he’s able to accomplish is technically impressive, it lacks the substantive emotional punch that a movie like this requires. His expertise seems better relegated to the B-movie thrills of a movie like Sabotage, the sleazy Schwarzenegger action picture he helmed earlier this year. The effort he makes in Fury doesn’t exactly signify nothing, but it’s a fitfully engrossing portrait of war stuck in the no man’s land between propulsive action and character drama.
