David Ayer’s (Harsh Times, End of Watch) Fury is a mix of bits and pieces from about every war movie you’ve ever seen. It’s Saving Private Ryan meets Apocalypse Now meets Black Hawk Down meets Platoon sprinkled in with a little bit of The Perfect Storm. It unsuccessfully tries to tug on your emotions while telling fragments of stories about each of the five main characters. If you read spoilers for this movie, you might think this movie is fantastic. The trailer makes the film look incredible.
The potential was there for this movie to be a classic. It had the correct script. It had the right cast. The direction was not excellent. If the goal was to feel for these characters as you do for the movies I mentioned in the first couple of sentences of this review, it ultimately failed. If the goal was to leave you with a story that you’d remember for years and years, it died there, too. If the goal was to provide a two-hour escape from life, I’m not sure it did that. At times, it was far too slow, and you weren’t exactly sitting on the edge of your seat during the action scenes. But, on the other hand, I never felt like I wasn’t watching a movie. That’s never a good thing.
Tom Hardy (