I really, really, wanted to like Fury. As the story goes, my grandfather drove a tank on D-Day and then through Europe up until and after the end of the war. I thought it'd be nice to maybe catch a glimpse into the life of a tank crew, even a fictional one like this.
Well, maybe not so much. What could have been a pretty interesting ride, turns out to be not much more than about two hours of listening to four of the dumbest characters ever written say a lot of really dumb things, while the new shy kid who shouldn't even be there gets initiated into the war. I should say that the characters themselves are idiots and say idiotic things, not necessarily the writers or actors, just to clarify.
Oh, and then the Alamo happens. I pretty much summed it up right there.
For me the whole thing fell flat in so many respects. There were several scenes that raised the excitement level, I won't lie to you. The battle at the tree line, then the "chase" scene.... and of course the end battle scene.
The "act" with the apartment in the town square, I saw what you did there, but it felt like just another iteration of the same old scene from so many other pictures.... as did much of the movie.
Pretty much there's a lot of this view right here.
But the characters, the "main" character, is not really Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) at all. Rather new kid on the block Norman (Logan Lerman) who has basically never even seen a tank up close before. He gets thrown into the driver's seat, almost literally, and forced to witness and do unspeakable things that up until now he's never even comprehended.
The rest of the tank crew is a traveling side show of stereotypes and crude, well, I was going to say humor but I don't think that's correct. Crude irony maybe. Much cringeworthy dialog was spoken by LaBeouf, Pena, and Bernthal. Much. Particularly in the aforementioned apartment/town square "act."
And make no bones about it, this film is bloody violent. Literally. Where Saving Private Ryan raised the bar for on-film graphic war violence, this movie is right there nudging it, trying to bump it up. Saying "hey buddy look what you missed! Check it out!"
I don't know, I just feel like this could have been better. It felt so damned bleak and disparaging that by the end, you're just burned out on bad humor, blood, and bullets. Maybe that's the point, maybe that's what its really like. Maybe that's Wardaddy's problem. I don't know, I wasn't there.
But back to the positives. The combat scenes were artfully executed, graphic as they may be.
Then there's "Wardaddy." I get where they tried to go with this character. The grisled "I've seen some shit, but I love you kids like sons" archetype that seems to be the norm in war movies. He and his crew are the local legends, the mythical "indestructables..." Again, I just felt like there was something not right. Perhaps in trying to make these guys, including Wardaddy, come across as ordinary slobs like you and me, they went too far.
I'm not going to speak to the technical accuracy of anything because I admit to having zero clues about any of it. It all looked pretty convincing and I don't recall having a "what?" moment about anything.
All that said I'm going to settle on a 6/10 for Fury. It wasn't a complete waste of time, but I just didn't think that it did enough where it should, and that it went too far where it shouldn't. If that makes any sense at all let me know.
Here's the trailer....
IMDB Linkage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2713180/
Official Movie Site: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/fury/
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