Brad Pitt’s action movie about an American tank commander and his wearied crew in the final year of the second world war has topped the US box office, and is set to do the same here. I originally reviewed it during the London film festival – it is watchable and well-made, though I can’t share the saucer-eyed excitement with which it has been received by some, due to a certain bizarrely naive “coming-of-age” sex scene that director David Ayer seems to think is some kind of humanistically redemptive moment.
Pitt himself has given an interview stating that war is not a video game – although Fury is clearly influenced by games such as Call of Duty, as well as movies such as The Dirty Dozen, Inglourious Basterds and Saving Private Ryan. He plays a grizzled veteran of the African and European campaigns who has come to hate the Nazis: and as his tank (dubbed Fury) rumbles into Germany he encounters quite a few. Under his command is a ragtag bunch, including a terrified kid called Norman, played by the cherubic Logan Lerman; Norman’s inexperience might get everyone killed, and Pitt takes a personal interest in him. Ayer does well in creating the weird listless boredom of war – interspersed with sudden frenzies of violence and fear as the soldiers engage the enemy. In the end, Pitt’s men seem destined for their own Alamo or Little Bighorn in the German countryside. It’s rousing, old-fashioned film-making.
