Movie Review: Fury

War is destructive; war is cruel; war is unforgiving, and in war, there are no such things as heroes — only soldiers. Unless, that is, one is talking about World War II. The conflict between the Allied (United States, Britain and USSR) and Axis (Germany, Italy and Japan) powers from 1939 to 1945 is depicted and remembered throughout cinema and television as the last “glorious” battle. Filled with the retroactively titled Greatest Generation, which stormed the beaches, villages, and cities of evil and genocidal despots to make democracy safe for the world, the majority of the annals of film history depict World War II as a destructive battle of good versus evil.

At the most, these films are gripping and engrossing entertainment. At their worst, they're jingoistic propaganda that glorify war. Movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” “Inglorious Basterds,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Dirty Dozen,” and shows such as “Band of Brothers” offer the perspective of groups of soldiers in grand movements that would bring any comic book superhero to shame.

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Not to say that serving in the military is not a courageous and selfless act, but the power of war can corrupt the soul completely. David Ayers, who practically invented the current operatic/warzone street drama with his screenplays for “Training Day,” “The Fast and the Furious,” and directing “Harsh Times,” “Street Kings” and “End of Watch,” brings his gritty, violent and combustible perspective to the sometimes poetic — but often bloated — genre of war films in “Fury.”

Depicting the travails of an American tank crew deep behind German lines in the last month of the war, “Fury” is refreshing in its devastation. A bleak sense of dread, despair and kinetic violence saturate the film, which offers no grand, sweeping symbolism of heroes or villains — just violent Americans killing cruel Nazi combatants. This lack of sentimentality is reflected in the cast of characters in the claustrophobic confines of the tank, Fury.

Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (played by Brad Pitt) leads a crew of predictably colorful, yet flawed men, all with their own eccentricities, such as the Southern evangelical Boyd “Bible” Swan (played by Shia LaBeouf), the alcoholic Trini “Gordo” Garca (Michael Peña), the violent Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (played by Jon Bernthal), and the virginal kid, just recently added to the crew, Norman Ellison (played by Logan Lerman), trained only to be a typist.

The entire company is comprised of tragically flawed men with their own demons to sort, along with the rain of hellfire that surrounds the German front. Ayers paints in large strokes of blood, mud, grime, limbs, sweat and tears, and the only solace that the crew has to survive the mental and physical atrocities of wartime is each other.

The dynamic, dysfunctional and intimate relationship of the tank crew is created through the cast’s exceptional chemistry, with gripping performances throughout, as well as Ayers’ grasp of the terror produced by the inner confines of a battered and bruised tank.

Pitt gives his strongest performance since 2011’s “Moneyball” as the tank leader who has survived since the storming of the desert of North Africa with his particular crew by embracing the violence around him while striving for any fragile semblance of sanity and normalcy off the battlefield. LaBeouf, who has been in the news for his outrageous behavior off screen as of late, gives his greatest performance yet as the moral, Scripture-quoting Boyd Swan. LaBeouf wears the tattered and charred bodies and craters of warfare on his face, always seemingly minutes away from breaking down, only holding on with faith in the Lord and a righteous God. His offscreen antics are well worth his recent career trajectory, taking roles of eccentric and erratic men — a welcome far cry from his time in the “Transformers” movie franchise.

Lerman, known for his roles in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and the “Percy Jackson” films, offers another solid performance as the inexperienced Norman Ellison, who acts as the audience surrogate, rapidly adapting to the totality and destruction of the battlefield. Peña and Bernthal act as polar opposites, the former cool, humorous and soft-spoken, and the latter is brash, crude and rough, which balances out the tank family.

There is sensational camaraderie on display to cope with Ayers' brutal honesty of the damage bullets, mortar, cannon fire and man can cause. But the most remarkable potential for cruelty goes unseen and unsaid. Amidst the blood and body count, Ayers has a quiet scene of the tank crew in the apartment of a mother and teenage daughter after taking over a small hamlet on their way to Berlin. During this brief interlude, Ayers weaves the brightest and bleakest aspects of human nature around just a dinner table.

War films alone could never cause society to give up petty and atrocious conflicts. But more like Ayers' “Fury” could only help serve to prove that even though there are victors and losers written down in the history books, all that's left on the battlefield and in the hearts and minds of soldiers and civilians is a vacuous and enveloping sound and fury.