It
is April, 1945. The second world war draws to an
agonizingly bloody close on German soil. Materializing out of a
haze of sunlight and gun smoke, a German officer atop a
weathered white horse trudges through a scorched
battlefield, floating in silence like a ghost amongst the
dead bodies and burning debris. There's a sad beauty to this image
that greets us at the onset of Fury,
steeped in an eerie serenity that the film's title does not suggest.
Naturally, this moment ends in an
abrupt and brutal fashion more typical to the rest of this rockem'
sockem' war story. Written and directed by David Ayer, many of whose
previous films and screenplays (End of Watch, Harsh Times,
Training Day) have been gritty studies in rock-hard
masculinity, Fury follows the perilous travails of a tank unit
as it pushes the Allied advance deeper into enemy territory in the
dying days of WWII.
Brad Pitt headlines as Sgt. Don
'Wardaddy' Collier, commander of a 30-ton M4 Sherman tank (the
eponymous Fury, whose moniker is scrawled across the cannon barrel as
if the bow of a ship) and its testosterone-oozing crew. This includes
Shia LaBeouf as its devout trigger man, Michael Peña
as its empathetic driver, and Jon Bernthal as its certifiable
mechanic. No, not “certified”, “certifiable”.
