|
Fury
| Released |
22 October 2014 |
| Director |
David Ayer |
Starring
|
Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Joe Bernthal, Jim Parrack, Jason Isaacs, Scott Eastwood |
| Writer(s) |
David Ayer |
Producer(s)
|
David Ayer, Bill Block, John Lesher, Ethan Smith |
Origin
|
United Kingdom, China, United States |
| Running Time |
134 minutes |
| Genre |
Action, drama, war |
| Rating |
15A |
|
|
Tanks, but no tanks.
"Yeah, that's a good idea, Homer but they've already made some movies about World War Two," slurred a drunken Troy McClure on an episode of The Simpsons when Homer tried to pitch him an idea for a war film.
The joke was obvious to anybody who has paid attention to Hollywood at all over the last sixty or so years. World War Two’s been done. So why do we need yet another film about the brave American boys fighting off the evil Nazis?
Fury at least opens with a promise of doing something different. It presents a seemingly anti-heroic and unglamorous portrait of the real war as hell. Tank commander "Wardaddy" Collier leads a crew of men broken by years of fighting, their humanity somehow soiled by the fact that they’ve gotten too good at killing.
When we meet them it’s April 1945. Allied victory is a foregone conclusion. The war should be over, but they find themselves pushed further into Germany, encountering bombed out towns and facing resistance composed of hastily convened militias of women, old men and children.
The battle scenes are tightly shot, cutting between the claustrophobic interior of the tank and sweeping wide angles of muddy killing fields. Combat is quick and brutal, with death always only a second away.
We’re encouraged to think that this isn’t just another Hollywood portrait of war viewed through the skewed lenses of unquestioning patriotism and the necessity that a film like this has good guys to root for. Wardaddy’s tank crew are genuinely unlikeable. These are brutal men who hate the enemy with the titular emotion, and consider anybody who speaks German to occupy that role.
In a way it recalls an anti-war exploration of violence unleashed like Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron. It almost seems like director David Ayer (End of the Watch) doesn’t want us to empathise or root for these men, only to be equally appalled and captivated by the level of violence they are capable of.
But only almost.
Just when Fury is right on the verge of becoming an actual good film with something to say, Ayer pulls the rug out from under the audience. The anti-hero thing was all a ruse. They’re the good guys after all, they just needed to overcome their cynicism and learn to work together as a team. They get a mission, and by all the dramatic weight the mission is given, you’d be forgiven for thinking that victory of the war hinged on it.
All the sports movie clichés get rolled. Our team of misfits must overcome their differences, learn the nature of sacrifice, overcome all odds… all those asinine story beats.
Worse still, Fury also features a genuinely problematic depiction of the rape of a German civilian by the youngest member of the crew – after we’re supposed to have started rooting for these guys.
The biggest problem with Fury isn’t that it’s a hopelessly misjudged film that does nothing that hasn’t been done in a million other war films before this one. Rather the problem is that it teetered on the verge of actually having something to say, possibly without even realising what it had on its hands.
That Fury is a bad movie isn’t the annoying thing; the annoying thing is how tantalisingly close it came to being good.
- Bernard O'Rourke |
