Reseñas de la crítica

Fury is a great macho fantasy: hellish, handsomely mounted, hard to forget. It rubs your nose in squalor and man's inhumanity to man. Yet there's something missing... The war was marked by cowardice and in-fighting, like any other human endeavour; the narrative of tough-guy camaraderie and uniquely evil SS troops is a simplification we impose now, when almost everyone who was actually there is dead.

As long as someone's head is being blown off, Fury isn't bad. The technique on display is about what you'd expect for a World War II movie that reserves its most reverent imagery for the mechanical majesty of tanks. But at some point you're able to pull yourself together to notice that when gunfire strikes a procession of armored vehicles and a soldier flies from a turret, he does so the way Gonzo might in a Muppet movie.

Forget the meat-and-potatoes war flick smothered in Caro-syrup gravy, or the weaker attempts at portraying the claustrophobia of living inside a movable metal death-trap. At its best, the movie works as a love letter to camaraderie-by-combat. Why pine for your girl back home when you can die next to some of the best buds a guy could ever hope to make?

One can't help but admire Ayer's commitment to showing the ugliness of the most mythologized of all wars, just as one can't help feeling disappointed that Ayer treats the ugliness as an end in and of itself. Seeing American soldiers execute prisoners is about as edifying as seeing a cop take bribes. At least the gore is convincing.

A scene in which our heroes' inferior M4 Sherman goes up against not one but two mighty German Tigers in a mud-caked field is a triumph of cinematic technique. Thrilling action aside, however, does Ayer actually bring anything new to the table here? Not really.

On the one hand, Ayer wants to critique the mythologizing of Hollywood war films, subverting his classic premise—a tight-knit American tank crew undertake a risky mission into Nazi territory—by making most of the principal characters amoral or even barbaric. On the other hand, he also wants to deliver a rousing action spectacle, so in the combat scenes any moral ambiguity goes out the window.

On the one hand, Fury is very much an analog effort (even if it was shot digitally), employing actual tanks on genuine terrain and avoiding the sort of hyper-real action filmmaking that Steven Spielberg pioneered with Saving Private Ryan... On the other hand, this film aims to depict the brutality of combat with gruesome candor, showing everything that was sanitized out of the classic war films being lovingly emulated. It's a tricky balancing act that Ayer navigates with only partial success.

Cast in a muddy palette of grays, browns, and greens, the film makes a dour show of this two-sided approach, claiming disgust at the horrors of war while relishing their gory shock value and the opportunities for down-and-dirty glory they facilitate.