Imagine the chilling opening beach scene from Saving Private Ryan–only for an entire film. It’s no wonder since director David Ayer (the vastly underrated LAPD flick, End of Watch) is at the helm. No brutality, however gory and explicit, is spared. No doubt there will be cries of “war porn” with Fury but they would be misguided. If anything, the film should be charged with updating the classic World War II genre to a level of technical expertise commiserate with present day film technology–hardly a crime. Unlike the equally savage but one dimensional and ultimately monotonous Lone Survivor, there is plenty of dramatic rhythm in this film. What counts is whether the characters make the proceedings believable. Thanks to a very good Brad Pitt and a fine supporting cast, this five man crew earn the viewer’s empathy despite offering an essentially bleak, queasy film experience. War is hell, war is hell, war is hell–when’s it all going to stop for these guys. Pitt makes you care. He’s a total nutbag, as irrational as he is stern. When he takes pause to freshen up after breaking into the apartment of a vanquished pair of fräuleins, we aren’t sure what he is going to do. Instead of harming them, he hangs them a carton of eggs and protects them from the rest of his crew. What could have come off corny in the wrong hands, earns a very touching outcome as the youngest member of Wardaddy’s crew, Norman (Logan Lerman) a war rookie, gains a chance to briefly return to life’s tender side. He surprisingly sits at the girls’ piano and belts out a classical piece, while one of the girls joins in on vocals.
Such endearing moments are rare when it’s April, 1945, and you are manning an M4 Sherman tank in the middle of Germany. Ayer reminds us the Germans desperately got even crazier as the war was nearing it’s end. Women and children, some very young, were forced into battle. Along the way, parents who refused to cooperate and turn over their kids to The Nazi war machine are shown hanging dead along the roadway as reminders of what happens to those who could not bring themselves to be part of the madness. I don’t remember seeing that before from any of the 1950s and 60s war films I watched as a kid.
Wardaddy knows how to speak German, somewhat of a shorthand plot facilitator, but an effective one nonetheless. His crew respect him dearly. There’s the religious man, Bible (ironically played by gossip mag bad boy Shia LaBeouf), the earthy gunner, Gordo (Michael Pena), who, to quote Wardaddy, occasionally slips into “speaking Mexican,” and the rebellious loose cannon, “Coon-Ass” (character actor Jon Bernthal, who keeps getting better and better). The rookie, looking like an out of place choir boy when he first appears to replace a beloved, recently deceased comrade of the group, gradually catches on and assumes a fiercer persona. Ayer forces us to feel his fear. The scenes between Pitt and Lerman are mostly terrific. He instills in the kid what he views as the required zeal for the bloodthirsty brutality necessary for survival. When we look at the reverence the rest of the crew have for the tough-as-nails Wardaddy, we realize their admiration rises from their sharing of that view. However nuts it is, the only way to survive is to be sicker and more violent than your enemy, to want to kill the brutes even more than they want to kill you. Or, as Wardaddy puts it, “Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.”
4 Unspeakable Brutalities Circa 1945 Germany (out of five stars)