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By Sandra Olmsted

Historically, any war film serves a number of functions: inspire the home front, revisit past victories and times of national spirit, honor the sacrifice and the men, renegotiate the war’s rationale, teach history, and question the nature of war.

The fault in writer/director David Ayer’s Fury is he tries too hard to incorporate too many of these reasons for making a war film. Fury, consequently, comes off as heavily trouped and too consciously moving from one purpose to another. Like every platoon film, the tank crew at the center of Fury has the required mix of mismatched buddies, willing to die for and with each other, but clearly so unlike each other, one has to wonder why they don’t kill each other. Perhaps it has to do with the quality of mercy, or maybe duty, or maybe fear, or maybe which ever one Sgt. Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) evokes to at the time to control and to keep safe his men.

Wardaddy, the tank commander, leads and controls his crew because he promises to keep them alive, if their existence can be called living. While Boyd “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf) quotes Scripture, hillbilly neanderthal Grady Travis (Jon Bernthal) spews the opposite sentiments, and Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Pena), negotiates between the two extremes and Wardaddy’s authority. As part of the 2nd Armored Division, they have been fight together and each other, in confines of the tank, from Africa to Belgium to the Netherlands and now into Germany as the Nazis make a last ditch effort, in April 1945. In many ways, this tank crew functions as one man and his id, ego, and superego. When their assistant driver is killed and replaced by a greenhorn from the typing pool, Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), the tight-knit unit could be in real trouble.

Not only does Norman’s innocence and lack of experience pose a threat to the tanker crew’s survival, but it also threatens the tenuous hold the crew has on sanity. That’s because Norman is who they were before they went to war and everything they fear they can never be again after what they have become. It soon become apparent that Wardaddy must turn the greenhorn Norman into a part of the killing machine if they want to survive.

Raging between savagely cruel and weirdly kind, Wardaddy guides Norman from innocence to soldier in the roughly 24 hours Fury chronicles. The most unusual scene, when Wardaddy and Norman, find two women hiding in an apartment. Full of tender hook emotions and even moments of tenderness and finally the arrival of the rest of the crew to remind the players and the audience that the war beckons, the scene functions as a play in the middle of the film.

Survival, in the end, will rely on an act of mercy, which Wardaddy and the tank crew could not have given and which ties up the theme of the nature of war and man. However, Ayer deviates immediately to a confirmation of American exceptionalism for the final scene of the film.

Ayer also makes some usually choices in his the camera work in Fury. Instead of cinematographer Roman Vasyanov employing the overused, quasi-documentary look so popular currently, Vasyanov returns to the studio-era look with solidly tripoded, well composed shots, in the confines of the tank, the action of battle, and the vistas. Using actual Sherman and Tiger tanks from World War II and a replica of the tank’s interior which has removable sections, Vasyanov gets claustrophobic interiors of the crew in their beloved Sherman tank.

Production designer Andrew Menzies authentically clothes the soldiers and towns people and realistically recreates Germany in the English countryside where Fury was shot. Editors Dody Dorn and Jay Cassidy make the battles clear and easy to follow, and Steven Price’s score adds just the right notes of pathos and patriotism performances from Pitt, LaBeouf, Bernthal, Pena, and Lerman, who all step outside their comfort zones for Fury.

From Sony Pictures Releasing, Fury is rated R for strong sequences of war violence, some grisly images, and language throughout and runs 134 minutes.

Fury is on theaters now.

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