By the end of “Fury,” I was rooti♋ng for Brad Pitt to get shot between the incisors.
This is a problem, because he’s the hero of the film — a hard-charging sergeant wh꧋o eats lead and cꦕraps shrapnel. Yet he’s a vainglorious bastard — vindictive, stupid and criminal.
His character should be brought up on charges or referred to the nearest psychoanalyst specializing in sadomasochism𓄧.
Director David Ayer (“Endღ of Watch”) has evidently decided that if you can’t sa෴y anything new about war, you should say the old stuff, loudly and with images worthy of a gross-out horror flick.
Most of Ayer’s imaginative power goes into orgies of violence —💧 men’s legs being cut off by machine-gun fir🌺e, a sliver of a face lying around like a dirty sock, another man who has been run over so many times, he has become one with the mud.
But for all its 21st-century special effect🐈s, the characters, dialogue and values of “Fury💯” are straight out of the ’50s. The 1650s, maybe.
Pitt plays Wardaddy, ꧑a staff sergeant leading the four surviving members of his 🏅platoon deep into the heart of Germany in April 1945. (Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30).
The comic-book name of the character tells you a lot: Sarge is absurdly cool under fire, always barking the right order at the right moment, armed with macho quips and grizzled directives: “Put some f 𝔍- - kin’ smoke in his face,” “Pull your s - - t together,” “Shut up and send me more pigs to kill.”
None of that Tom 🧸Hanks in “Saving Private Ryan” shaky-hand stuff for him: The only sign that he’s under duress is a 10-second shudder he allows him๊self when no one is looking.
To woo lady filmgoers, Ayers tosses in a comp💛letely unconvincinꦦg scene that imagines people in severe deprivation and horror can fall in love in about 30 seconds.
Sgtꩵ. Hero should probably be court-martialed for starting a tank battle while leaving many boxes of ammo sitting outside and drinking booze, yet Ayer treats this, too, as an occasion for worship: He thinks it looks so cool to have the star climb out of the tank in midfiref🔯ight to retrieve the rounds.
The men are straight out of Cliché Battalion: There’s a Christian (Shia LaBeouf), a guy who is mocked for speaking “Mex🉐ican” (Michael Peña), a mean-spirited cynic (Jon Bernthal) and the raw recruit (Logan Lerman) who needs to be retrained to enjoy killin’ — even unarmed, unresisting prisoners of war, in cold blood.
That’s a war crime, not a baptism by fire.
The film is, at times, a harrowing, visceral experience — you can almost smell the corpses as truckloads of them rumble through the m𝐆ud — and the grit of “Fury” makes a contribution, of sorts.
Yet I couldn’t he♈lp suspecting that there’s a pornographic leer to it all, 🦹a savage glee.
“It will end soon, but before it happens, a lo🔯t more people gotta die,” Pitt’s character tells us.
Thanks, Sgt. Obvious, but there’s much more to war than just maximizing the body count, 𝓡and this film’s implication that getting mowed down a few days before war’s end is more glori💛ous than surrender is appalling, juvenile and wrong.
It was the bad guys who wore de🦹ath’s 🙈heads on their uniforms, remember?