Fury - review: 'Brad Pitt gives one of his best ever performances'

As a heroic tank commander, Brad Pitt lives up to the nickname his troops give him and David Ayer’s WWII drama sets a new standard for war movies
Full throttle: Brad Pitt gives one of his best performances, ruthless yet dedicated to his men
Allstar
David Sexton24 October 2014

The director of this film, David Ayer, has a speciality: men, in a vehicle, doing their jobs, under stress, under attack. At 18, Ayer joined the United States Navy and he served on a nuclear submarine until the end of the Cold War, not the usual formation for a writer/director. After an honourable discharge, his first film credits were as a co-writer on the sub thriller U-571 in 2000 and the street racing classic The Fast and the Furious in 2001. That year he also wrote and co-produced Training Day, a beast of a film about a rookie cop (Ethan Hawke) being monstered by his corrupt partner (Denzel Washington, winning an Oscar). It’s a shame Ayer didn’t direct that too. His quasi-documentary thriller End of Watch (2012) about a closely bonded pair of good-guy cops (Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena) is startlingly good visually as well as verbally.

Now here’s his tank movie, a logical progression in its way. It’s April 1945. The five-man crew of a Sherman tank, nicknamed Fury, commanded by Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) are pushing on into Germany, still meeting fanatical resistance from the Nazis.

The film opens on a scene of apocalyptic destruction, the aftermath of a tank battle. An SS officer rides through the mist on a white horse, the pale rider of death. Suddenly a figure launches himself from one of the stranded tanks and savagely kills the Nazi, stabbing him in the eye. It’s Wardaddy — and this is pretty much the film’s only symbolic image until the white horse goes by again at the very end. From now on, proceedings are bitterly practical.

The tank returns to an improvised base camp, the only survivor of its unit. Fury’s assistant driver has been killed and a new kid, Norman (22-year-old Logan Lerman, previously a teen player in Noah, The Three Musketeers, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower) comes in to replace him as the bow gunner. Norman is a clerk-typist, only eight weeks in the army, and he’s never seen the inside of a tank before. The next 24 hours are going to be the toughest training day ever, Norman’s first task being to wash out the remains of his predecessor, including most of his face, from the tank.

Fury’s crew (loader Jon Bernthal, driver Michael Pena), hardened by their long campaign, are reluctant to accept the new recruit. “Wait till you see,” says the gunner (Shia LaBeouf, convincingly filthy). “See what?” “What a man can do to another man.” After their first terrifying engagement, Wardaddy forces him to kill. “You’re no goddam good to me unless you can kill Krauts,” he says. “Do it, Norman. Do your job.”

A day of relentless battle follows with just one, rather dodgy, interlude when, having taken a town, Wardaddy and Norman break into the home of two German women but then behave honourably towards them, to the anger of the rest of the crew — a scene possibly included mainly to allow Pitt to display his mighty torso as he enjoys a strip-wash.

A terrifying set-piece pits four Shermans against a more heavily armoured but less mobile German Tiger tank, a contest astonishingly intensely realised, like all the action sequences here. Filmed in Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire, using veteran vehicles from the Tank Museum in Dorset as well as recreations, Fury sets a new standard for graphic violence and unsparing detail in war films, Ayer taking us right inside the tank, shooting up close from many different angles, by removing the fourth wall.

Yet it’s the men, not the machine, that are the real focus. Brad Pitt gives one of his best ever performances: he has here such a commanding presence, such composure and authority, so ruthless yet so dedicated to his men. Lerman is excellent too, stunned by what he’s experiencing but finding his courage.

Fury prizes valour, men holding together under horrific circumstances. “Best job I ever had,” the men say, as they volunteer for annihilation. It is not in any way ironic or half-hearted about those masculine values — and Ayer has confirmed that, in having his heroes fight against fanatical Nazis, he is deliberately exploiting the fact that there is little moral complication involved. “Everything today is morally murky — the Second World War had moral clarity. Plus, Nazis are great bad guys — like zombies. You can kill lots of them and not raise hackles,” he says cheerily.

Fury (on which Ayer was advised by veterans of the 2nd Armoured Division) is a simplification, packing a crazy amount of warfare into a single day, but it’s still wonderfully dynamic, compelling film-making. If it’s not quite so overwhelming as Elem Klimov’s Come and See (USSR, 1985), or as ambitious in its scope as Saving Private Ryan, it’s unmissable nevertheless.

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