Movie Review: "Fury"

"Fury": C.  I guess I am a sucker for attending super-hyped war movies starring matinee idols.  In May I caved in to the multitude of promotions and saw Monuments Men, featuring George Clooney as the leader of a GI troop with a mission to save priceless art confiscated by the Germans.  Ho hum; B- (reviewed on May 9).  A few days ago, more or less the same thing happened.  Fury was heavily promoted as a World War II story starring Brad Pitt.  For a $2.50 investment at Hopkins Theater, I thought it was worth a gamble.  War stories are a film genre I like, and some of them (The Dirty Dozen, Apocalypse Now, and my gold standard, The Deer Hunter) are among my all-time favorites of any kind.  I am sad to report that Fury is not in that august company.  I can't, in good conscience, rate it higher than a C.

The movie follows a five man tank group, led by tough guy Sergeant Don Collier (Pitt).  The title of the movie is the name of their tank, painted in white on the long gun protruding from the vehicle's front.  Despite its length of 135 minutes, the story basically takes place over three scenes, all behind enemy lines inside Germany: the rescue mission of other GIs who are playing dead while under fire in an open meadow, the invasion of a small village providing lots of hiding places for the bad guys, and the defense of a countryside crossroads for the purpose of keeping the Germans from making their way to a distant American supply line.  For the most part, each of these scenes is independent of the other two, and consume too many minutes of viewing time.

As you would expect from a war movie, there are a fair number of gun battles, but their staging is not impressive.  One problem is that the focus is always on Pitt, who does not, himself, shoot any of the tank's weapons; he merely instructs his four underlings where to aim.  If it is true that soldiers manning tank weaponry needed their superior to tell them whom to shoot, it is a miracle we won the war.  Another problem is the annoying habit of saying everything at least twice.  "Watch out for the tree line!  Watch out for the tree line!"  Or, "Krauts at ten o'clock! Krauts at ten o'clock!"  It reminded me of coaching youth baseball games, when I could hear the players' parents yelling from the grandstand.  "It only takes one, Billy.  It only takes one!"  Or, "You can do it, number seven.  You can do it!"

I usually like Pitt as an actor, but it seems he mailed this one in.  There are several scenes when the viewer expects him to say something forceful, perhaps even witty, but instead he strikes a silent pose, sometimes even displaying a goofy face.  Is this acting?  Casting Shia LaBeouf as a hardened army veteran is also questionable.  He comes across more as a short order cook at Liquor Lyle's.  Perhaps I'd have a problem with LaBeouf being cast in any movie.

The only interesting character in the bunch is the greenhorn newcomer, Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman).  Trained for clerical duty, he is nevertheless assigned to man a gun inside Fury, the tank.  "I was trained to type sixty words a minute, not to kill people," he protests to Sergeant Collier.  Of course, as soon as those words part his lips, you know he is going to have to do just that, maybe more than once.  Collier's words of advice to Ellison are, "Do what you're told. Don't get too close," meaning don't get too personally attached to your colleagues, because they might die in a flash right before your eyes.

Predictability is a problem with any movie, especially war movies, and Fury has its share of it.  The movie also falls victim to portraying the Germans as imbecilic opponents, especially in the last act.  Are we to believe that a company of over a hundred jerries can't figure out how to put an American tank out of commission?

If you have an extra moment, go back and read the last paragraph of my June 25, 2014 review of Jersey Boys.  The topic of that paragraph is ensemble movies.  Jersey Boys is the story of the four guys who comprised the singing group the Four Seasons.  Fury is the story of a five man tank group.  Fury is the antithesis of Jersey Boys.  That, in a nutshell, explains why the music movie is a triumph while the war movie is not.