I’ll be revisiting old movie reviews from the past three years here this summer. Ones you may have missed, passed up or completely forgot about. Stay tuned. First up is Brad Pitt’s FURY.

“Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.”-Don“War Daddy” Collier (Brad Pitt)

Diagnosis-Fury is the best World War II film since Saving Private Ryan and also brings out the best performance in the troubled career of Shia Labeouf.

David Ayer has been waiting to make Fury for a long time, holding his ace of spades in his pocket for the past decade. Let’s just say he didn’t miss when he swung for the fence with Fury, a brutally realistic punch to the gut that combines the red meat history of Saving Private Ryan with the visceral testosterone of Lone Survivor.

There are certain genres a director has to be careful with and World War II is one of them. War pictures aren’t easy to make these days because there have been so many different takes on the battle that killed many and ended in victory. Ayer could have wrapped this tale in Hollywood gloss and just phoned it in. Viewers are generally worn out with this genre that doing something original and viscerally exciting is a hard task. Ayer pulls it off here by choosing the right story and bringing an authentic touch to the camera.

Fury tells a darker tale of the war, a time towards the end that saw the monstrous German tanks leveling the lesser equipped American tanks and where Hitler got so desperate that he deployed men, women and kids to try to and win the war. Ayer isn’t afraid to show you the coldness that violence brings to the souls and how killing a man truly changes a person. (more…)