Fury (David Ayer, 2014)

[DarkImbecile]

I originally intended to write about this under the War List Project thread, then realized that, as far as my forum search skills indicate, there hasn't been anything else written about Fury beside its placement on a few 2014 top ten lists (it's ended up outside of mine at the moment, for reasons detailed below). While not a modern classic, I think it's probably good enough to merit some discussion (and probable placement on my War List submission).

I was happily surprised following the "Honor. Glory. War." poster campaign that the film itself mostly aims to accurately depict the last of those themes rather than try to horn in the first two. The graphic violence, grim and occasionally macabre imagery, and morally problematic decisions are a fitting depiction of the end stages of the war, and far more welcome than the easily-consumed and quickly forgotten war drama of something like Defiance. The tank crew the film follows during the punishing drive through Germany is composed of flawed, damaged people who are pretty far from the idealized Greatest Generation heroes that I'm sure the marketing campaign for the film would have preferred to lionize, but who make for far more compelling viewing.

As far as the cast goes, Pitt does fine work, if a little one-note, as the harshly paternal tank commander, as does Logan Lerman as the green, "I'm not even supposed to be here!" kid, but the best performances come from television stalwart Jon Bernthal and (!) Shia LeBoeuf, who provide what could be simplistic caricatures with nuanced shadings of the coping mechanisms deployed to process an unbearable situation. The blue-grey color scheme and the ravaged countrysides and towns are ably photographed by Roman Vasyanov, and Ayer ably executes the action sequences such that they feel refreshingly dynamic and have a clear sense of space and strategy.

Unfortunately,

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after the mostly compelling and occasionally excellent first two-thirds of the film, including a prolonged, tense sequence with some locals and one of the more dynamic and realistic small-scale tank battles ever filmed, the climax falls victim to the assumed need for the tropes of a) a massive battle against overwhelming odds which results in b) a series of tragic, self-sacrificing ends for most of the cast and which is all due to c) a truly unreasonable act of what I guess is supposed to be heroism, but which doesn't fully justify itself in terms of story logic and especially as a major reversal of what we'd been shown of the main characters' motivations for the previous 90 minutes. There were so many other ways for the final sequence to play out basically as it did without the characters - Pitt's War Daddy in particular - actively choosing to place themselves in that situation. This stumble, and the final declaration of the titular tank crew's heroism, was so jarringly out of place with the rest of the film's tone and treatment of 20th-century warfare that it ultimately holds the overall film back from being one of the year's better major studio films.

Still, Fury is worth a look for the many things it does well, and as an example of how to undermine some sizable positive attributes with some under-cooked decision-making (which, while I have no evidence that this is the case, I'm going to assume out of reflex was probably the result of studio pressures).

Trailer

[Mr. Brown]

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a truly unreasonable act of what I guess is supposed to be heroism, but which doesn't fully justify itself in terms of story logic and especially as a major reversal of what we'd been shown of the main characters' motivations for the previous 90 minutes.

Indeed, to some extent I also agree with you on this matter. However, I find that this final act adds to the character's credibility. Time after time we see that Pitt's crew is almost always the 'last man standing'. We can observe this at the beginning of the film and near the middle where the three American tank crews attempt to take down a single German tank. This in turn creates an overconfidence bias leading Pitt to make an irrational decision which essentially leads to their downfall. But is this necessarily a bad thing? What I find interesting about this sequence is that it makes the characters seem even more real. Who doesn't want to die a hero? Visibly, on a personal level, the crew is deteriorating with every mission they accomplish and they are clinging on life by a very fine thread (of sanity). Perhaps it was simply time for them to pass (clearly their experiences were becoming too much to handle psychologically) and Pitt offered them a 'glorious' opportunity to do so.

Bottom line, in my opinion the initiating factor of the final sequence added realism, while in general I do agree that it was unsatisfactory when looking at the film as you very well stated above.