Don "Wardaddy" Collier, Pitt has the same not-quite-standard-issue haircut he sported as the Nazi-huntin' Army lieutenant in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds five years ago. Everyone in its five-man crew has a "war name": the born-again Shia LaBeouf is "Bible," the alcoholic Michael Peña is "Gordo," and so on.Īs the commander, Sgt. We follow the crew of Fury, a Sherman tank that's been in the war since Africa, 1942. Though it was shot mostly in Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire, England, this is the odd military picture wherein (save for Jason Isaacs doing his best Moe Szyslak impression), the American soldiers are actually played by Americans. And as with Saving Private Ryan, a few clumsy steps in the late going - specifically, a final act fueled by the sort of fantasy machismo that the film has until that point avoided - do nothing to blunt the impact of Fury's superb first 90 minutes. But Fury reminds us like no film since Saving Private Ryan 16 years ago that there was nothing good about it, and it does so with considerably less flag-waving. (He spares the horse.) It's April 1945, the last, exhausted gasp of "Good War" in Europe in a few weeks Hitler will kill himself in a bunker and the Thousand-Year Reich will surrender in Year 13. Then Brad Pitt tackles the rider, whose Nazi uniform has come into focus, and drives his knife through the officer's eye and into his brain. Ayer's patient camera tracks him into a metal thicket of burning American Shermans and their superior German counterparts, Tigers. A rider on a white horse crosses a misty field in no great hurry, gradually filling the frame. Brad Pitt plays Wardaddy, an Army sergeant leading a mission in Nazi Germany.įury, David Ayer's brutal, reflective, wholly absorbing World War II movie, is about tank-to-tank combat and the way war degrades everyone it touches, but for about a minute it looks like a Western.
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