Review of Fury (2014) by Teaguewd — 19 Feb 2015

‘Fury' is a film that manages to be something terrible despite having everything they could ever need at their disposal. All the ingredients are available for a gourmet meal, but somehow it still manages to serve up a platter where the main course contains velveeta “cheese”. Its not surprising, that this isn’t in the top-tier of war movies, but such a pitiful horror-show of cliched mise-en-scene flanked throughout with the exact same visual effects as the first few Star Wars Films(accompanied of course by the same laseresque sound effects) was not what I’d expected.

I rarely resort to the term ‘offended’, but I think thats exactly the feeling I found swelling up inside of me watching this film. As these catastrophic events unfolded before me, I was just on the verge of physical illness. Now the catastrophe I refer to most directly correspond to the performances of an otherwise noteworthy cast. In fact, as the main characters died off, I found myself feeling relieved. It wasn’t so much that I hated the characters, although none of them are the least bit likable(or more importantly plausible), but that there would be no more of their intensely cliched catchphrases, some of which were probably repeated at record breaking numbers for just 134 mins.

Its amazing to look back on the plot, and try to think about the narrative; what, if anything, happened? I’m not sure what could be said about this to make it more interesting. If you are looking for action scenes: there surprisingly few, and they are about as intense as a Telenovela, a bit like playing Battleship when you’ve already had ten drinks. Historical accuracy? If you’ve read more than three paragraphs describing WW2, you know there’s something off with this. Its simple-minded portrayal of the German army and its soldiers is overwhelmingly dismissive, to a point so superficially conceived that its jarring, not just for a war film, but any Hollywood movie. Needless to say it was not so compelling.

What was truly compelling, was the shoddiness of the film’s performances. Brad Pitt was Lt. Aldo Rain, taken down a few notches from exciting to uninvested. Michael Pena took painfully cliche to chalkboard-scraping levels. The guy from the Walking Dead was the worst, his stereotype of sex-crazed, moronic, inbred Southerners wasn’t even believable enough to be cliche(or consistent to be funny). Shia LaBeouf decided to go crazy over the wrong movie(Or maybe he just awakened psychological problems from the fist-fight-free-for-all the director forced the main ensemble to partake in). Lerman, the youngest actor, in fact did admit to being emotionally scarred due to this practice during production, and his performance was probably better than the rest of them.

Its hard to tell what they were going for with this ensemble, but not one of them was on the same page as any of the others. Alone they put up career-destroying performances, but together created a genre annihilating ensemble. I can’t tell how it worked out this badly. Every scene, every bit of dialogue was truly cringeworthy, the script seemingly generated by a computer whose inspiration was retrieved in bulk from the $5 DVD section at Walmart. Visually speaking, the film isn’t terribly shot whenever we get past the constant close-ups(the visual style complemented by somewhat interesting, highly-saturated version of the Band of Brothers look). Nonetheless its impossible to enjoy, cut up by editing akin to chopping the constituent elements of garden salad with a machete, and throwing them together in an ill-matching concoction of dressings. Amidst the constant gunfire sound-effects, everything stops for a failed dramatic moment about five times throughout, often when the characters face point-blank gunfire. In the final battle scene, consecutive shots bring everything from full daylight to darkest night. At his point, I decided to go to the restroom for a moment of respite, and started to wonder what else I could have done with my $2.50 besides visit this **** dollar theater.

In the restroom at some point during the film’s exhibition I saw a very old man wearing one of those hats Veterans sometimes wear from reunions. Like many, my grandfathers were in WWII, and I wondered what they would have thought of this movie if they were alive to see it. After all, its been a long time since the war, the youngest veterans of which would be around 88 years old this year, and here was one, barely able to stand up, but he had made the trip here to see this. That’s when I started to feel really bad. I had laughed when I saw the family of five walk in, all of them in head-to-toe camo, but now my heart sank. Maybe the people who were actually there deserve better than ‘Fury'. Of all the Hollywood genres, the War Film seemed to be historically the most consistently interesting and compelling. Just like that, I don’t know if that is longer any accurate. Maybe we all deserve better.