Now, with the war in its endgame, they face a vicious and desperate enemy. Transferred from the typing pool, he reads Hemingway and plays classical piano, and is clearly more sensitive than the others, who are cut from coarser cloth and have been further battered by grueling campaigns in North Africa, Italy and Normandy. Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), who has yet to earn a nickname, serves as both the smooth-faced newbie - afraid of dying and appalled by the callousness of his comrades - and as the crew’s designated egghead. There is a tenderness between him and Wardaddy that is one of the film’s subtlest and most intriguing touches.
Bible (an excellent Shia LaBeouf), while he occasionally lets fly an obscenity or two, is more apt to quote Scripture and warn his comrades about the wages of sin. Gordo (Michael Peña), who is Mexican-American, and Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal), from somewhere in the American South, disguise their loyalty to each other in profane insults and occasional bursts of bigotry. The men under him are the kind of motley, semi-diverse assortment that usually anchors this genre. Wardaddy - an archetypal squad leader, tough and quiet, with sad eyes that testify to the terrible things he’s seen - is in charge of four other men, and the long hours they spend together, in constant danger and the limited space of the tank, result in an atmosphere of rough and unpretentious intimacy. Later, he will order the summary execution of an SS officer who has just surrendered, after confirming that the man was responsible for the deaths of children.īut within this gore-spattered, superficially nihilistic carapace is an old-fashioned platoon picture, a sensitive and superbly acted tale of male bonding under duress.
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Then he calms the dead man’s beautiful white horse and sets it free across the battlefield. Pitt in “Fury,” he leaps from his tank, tackles a German officer and stabs him through the eye. Nazis are just about the only real-world figures who consistently merit the fates reserved, in other genres, for zombies, aliens and orcs. But while the Allied fight against Germany may sometimes raise thorny questions about ends and means, it also retains an ethical clarity, a righteousness, that at least partly accounts for its durable appeal among commercial filmmakers and their audiences. Tarantino, but the business of Nazi killing remains brisk.Īnd why shouldn’t it be? The world is a complicated place, and war, as a subject for novels and movies, often presents a tangle of moral ambiguity and a fog of confusion. Don Collier (nicknamed Wardaddy), is a wearier, less garrulous fellow than Raine, and the film’s director, David Ayer, has a more linear and literal sensibility than Mr. Pitt returns to combat in “Fury,” playing the leader of an American tank crew fighting its way across Germany in the spring of 1945. Aldo Raine) in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” Five years later, and nearly 70 years after World War II, Mr. And cousin, business is a-booming.” So said Brad Pitt (in the person of Lt.