Two movies inside one tank
For its first ninety minutes, Fury is one of the best armored-warfare films ever shot. Director David Ayer (who wrote Training Day and directed End of Watch) treats the five-man crew of the tank "Fury" like a burnt-out narcotics squad that has been undercover too long. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt), Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis (Jon Bernthal), and Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Peña) have kept each other alive from North Africa through France, and they have developed a feral, insular code to survive.
When Norman (Logan Lerman)—a kid trained to type 60 words a minute—is assigned as their replacement assistant driver, he serves as the audience's eyes. He freezes when a teenaged German soldier ambushes the column with a Panzerfaust, getting an American lieutenant and his crew burned alive. What follows isn't a pep talk; it's Wardaddy dragging Norman out into the mud and forcing him to execute a captured German soldier who is wearing a US Army coat and begging for his life with a picture of his wife.
The apartment scene is the real test
Parents usually expect the combat gore in a war movie, and Fury has plenty of it: white phosphorus shells, tank treads rolling over corpses, and tracer rounds slicing men in half.
What catches people off guard is the twenty-minute centerpiece in a newly captured German town. Wardaddy and Norman enter an apartment and find a German woman, Irma, hiding her teenage cousin, Emma, under the bed. For a brief, surreal stretch, Wardaddy creates a pocket of civilization: hot water for shaving, fried eggs, coffee, and Norman playing the piano with Emma.
Then the rest of the tank crew barges in, drunk, traumatized, and antagonistic. Jon Bernthal's character is terrifying here—not because he's a cartoon villain, but because he plays a guy who has been living in filth and terror for years and resents anyone pretending to be civilized. There is no graphic sexual violence shown on screen, and Emma goes into the bedroom with Norman willingly, but the atmosphere of conquest and coercion is thick and deeply uncomfortable.
When realism gives way to Hollywood
The movie loses a bit of its nerve in the final thirty minutes. After hitting a landmine at a vital crossroads, the five-man crew decides to stay inside their immobilized tank to hold off an entire battalion of 300 Waffen-SS soldiers marching toward the fragile American supply lines.
Suddenly, the crack SS troops who spent the first two hours picking off tanks with lethal efficiency start running directly into machine-gun fire like action-movie Stormtroopers, while the lighting shifts to stylized red and green tracer beams. It's still tense and emotional, and the brotherhood between the five men pays off, even if history nerds will roll their eyes at how long a single broken tank survives against a battalion carrying anti-tank rockets.
