Fury (2014)
Directed by David Ayer
April, 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theater, a battle-hardened army sergeant commands a Sherman tank with a five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines.
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52 films that influenced Fury
What critics say influenced Fury
The Platoon parallels are the most obvious, right down to the final shot, while an early scene depicting a recent battlefield was reminiscent of everything from Patton to The Big Red One.
It’s also, intentionally I think, a nod to Samuel Fuller’s war-movie milestone The Big Red One, which similarly placed an anachronistic equine amidst the red-misted fog of war.
He’s trying for the grit and grandeur and surprise of latter-day American war films — Apocalypse Now, The Big Red One, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, Inglourious Basterds.
Much of Fury hangs on Pitt, and he carries the load dutifully, though Wardaddy’s dicy blend of blood-lusting avenger and reflective soul never fully marry, which is true of much of Ayer’s vision; it never quite registers the true organic essence of men in war the way “alternative” WW II gems like The Big Red One and Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron do.
“Fury” is more like Sam Fuller’s personal war memoir, “The Big Red One” — straightforward, less poetic, an action film with a hint of humanity and history that is fast receding from view.
(This movie also looks like it smells really bad.) Adopting the rambling, anecdotal structure of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, Fury works best when it’s a shapeless chronicle of surreal, day-to-day horrors.
This gory, big-budget World War II movie by writer-director David Ayer (End of Watch) recalls Saving Private Ryan in its assured craftsmanship and underlying hypocrisy.
The newcomer is an almost comical sight beside the hardened animals played convincingly by Michael Peña, Shia LaBeouf and Jon Bernthal, and he'll doubtless remind many of the reluctant translator (Jeremy Davies) in Saving Private Ryan.
At its core, the World War II film is an action epic that recalls Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” without living up to that film’s noble greatness.
Pitt’s Don has echoes of the Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan, shaky hand and mercurial back story and all, but he also has the immersive, holy war bloodlust of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.
Written and directed by David Ayer, the tough but terrific “Fury” may remind moviegoers of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” another film that addressed the horrors of World War II.
That scene is nothing compared to some of the other violence on display (think “Saving Private Ryan”), but it’s worth noting that it never feels gratuitous.
The rest of the cast, though, makes less of an impression — an intense Michael Pena, an insane Jon Bernthal (who seems to be channeling John Cassavetes from "The Dirty Dozen") and Shia LeBeouf as a Bible-quoting Southerner who always seems to be shedding a single tear, perhaps because he just realized he's Shia LeBeouf.
Although many commentators will no doubt immediately compare the new WW II epic "Fury" to Quentin Tarantino's brilliant "Inglourious Basterds," largely because both films star Brad Pitt as a heavily-scarred, drawling Army man leading his men in a quest to kill as many Nazis as possible, it is actually closer in tone to a straightforward and un-ironic guys-on-a-mission tale along the lines of " The Dirty Dozen " or "Where Eagles Dare," with a heavy dollop of gruesome bloodletting depicting the true horrors of armed conflict that have been de rigueur for the war movie genre in the wake of " Saving Private Ryan ."
Wardaddy is a tough veteran with scars all over his body — as in many of his movies, Pitt takes the opportunity to display his physique — whose comrades-in-arms resemble the usual bunch of misfits seen in most Hollywood WWII movies since The Dirty Dozen.
In the most obvious ways, “Fury” reaches back to the rousing, band-of-brothers tradition of ‘60s and ‘70s war movies like “The Big Red One” or “The Dirty Dozen,” but it also reflects, more than a little, the post-Vietnam shadow that fell across later films like “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket.”
Lacking the single-minded intensity of Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon , which did a cleaner job of trapping its audience inside a tank, this is still undeniably stirring stuff, buoyed by Steven Price’s boisterous score which builds toward an end-credits theme reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith’s demonic Ave Satani from The Omen .
In fact, the premise recalls the superior Lebanon (2009), which took place entirely inside the claustrophobic confines of a tank.
It's this part of the drama that most closely resembles Samuel Maoz's 2009 Israeli film Lebanon, which detailed what it's like for men to occupy a fetid, claustrophobic metal vault on wheels while being bombarded by hard-to-see foes.
There was more clammy tension in two minutes of Lebanon, the gripping 2009 film set entirely inside an Israeli tank, than there is in the whole of Fury.
Echoing Samuel Maoz’ Lebanon, Fury is a movie about a lone tank and the soldiers who man it.
Fury doesn’t come close to the achievement of those edifying cinematic ordeals, let alone to Samuel Maoz’s harrowing Israeli film Lebanon , which summoned a claustrophobic psychopathy by setting virtually all its action inside an Israeli tank.
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The claustrophobic tank setting brings to mind such notable submarine dramas as Das Boot and Run Silent, Run Deep, right down to the inhabitants' frayed nerves and constant bickering.
What Wolfgang Petersen did for submarines in "Das Boot" more than 30 years ago, Ayer has done in a Sherman tank.
“Fury” may aspire to be the “Das Boot” of tank movies.
"Fury" is not a genre landmark like "Das Boot" or "Saving Private Ryan" — but its perspective is distinctive.
Fury is to tank warfare what Das Boot was to the dread of life on a German U-boat.
The Platoon parallels are the most obvious, right down to the final shot, while an early scene depicting a recent battlefield was reminiscent of everything from Patton to The Big Red One.
In a way, Fury and 1970's Patton could be considered companion pieces.
This gory, big-budget World War II movie by writer-director David Ayer (End of Watch) recalls Saving Private Ryan in its assured craftsmanship and underlying hypocrisy.
Ayer, who has dealt with charismatic bad boys before — he wrote the script for “Training Day” and directed the sharp police drama “End of Watch” — makes the paternal “Wardaddy” into a figure both monstrous and upstanding.
Ayer, a veteran of the Navy and L.A. crime films like "Training Day" and "End of Watch," wants to make it clear from the start that he's making a film about the barbaric brutality of war.
Easily the most ambitious film in Ayer’s canon of cannon fodder, “Fury” aims higher and shoots deeper than the filmmaker’s previous men-with-guns epics “Training Day,” “Dark Blue,” “End of Watch” and the recent DEA bust, “Sabotage.”
Until now, writer-director Ayer has largely focused his attention on gritty LAPD dramas, Tasering the genre back to life with such tell-it-like-it-is pics as “Training Day” and “End of Watch.”
And writer-director David Ayer, previously known for cop-buddy films “Training Day” and “End of Watch,” has crafted a grim and gripping small-scope epic about the horrors men deal with in combat.
It’s like dozens of other tank films, like a gory version of Humphrey Bogart’s Sahara, but that’s not a bad thing.
Two rare exceptions are 1943’s Sahara and 1988’s The Beast of War, both of which centred on lone tank crews bravely engaging the enemy against seemingly impossible odds.
1943’s Sahara comes to mind along with the more recent The Beast and Lebanon (which takes place entirely inside of a tank), but there aren’t too many more.
There are countless war movies, but few — like Humphrey Bogart in "Sahara" (1943) — are told from the cramped perspective of a tank.
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Pitt’s Don has echoes of the Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan, shaky hand and mercurial back story and all, but he also has the immersive, holy war bloodlust of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.
In places, director David Ayer (End of Watch) goes for the hallucinatory horrors of the great Russian war film Come and See, as bodies pile up in heaps of limbs.
While no one could mistake Fury for Elem Klimov’s great Come and See, the film is defined by properly muddy battlefields, littered with corpses.
It's no Stalingrad or Come and See (and thank Christ for that), the ending is a little too rah rah (for a typist, Norman turns into a hell of a marksman), and Wardaddy's offhand philosophizing ("Ideals are peaceful.