TORONTO — Brad Pitt blasts back onto the big screen in Fury, a film set during the final days of World War II.
He plays Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier, an army sergeant who commands a Sherman tanks and its crew on a deadly mission in Nazi Germany. The men on his mission are played by Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal.
Are war-weary audiences willing to watch Fury unfold or will the movie bomb? Here’s a look at what some of the critics are saying.
“Graphic, grim and fairly relentless, Fury is one of those war-is-hell movies that revel a bit too much in the evil men do,” opined Tom Long in The Detroit News.
“There isn’t all that much plot here, mostly grisly battle scenes tempered with a tense afternoon of respite in a fallen town, leading to the inevitable and somewhat clichéd final slaughter scene.”
Long said Fury is “a brutal film that too easily celebrates rage and bloodshed to no clear end beyond ugly spectacle.”
Mara Reinstein of US Weekly also thought the movie was a bit much.
“For two hours, the tankers shoot and kill and explode and shoot and kill and explode. (All of the above is set to a bombastic musical score). There’s a mind-numbing and emotionally hollow flow to all it,” she wrote.
Reinstein said it’s difficult to invest in the characters because they are so indistinguishable.
“The collateral damage? A feeling of ambivalence about their respective well beings during the perilous, climactic stand-off,” she said.
The movie, Reinstein concluded, “will just leave audiences feeling battle-fatigued.”
READ MORE: What the critics are saying about more recent movies
At TIME, Richard Corliss seemed to agree.
“It is plenty grim and grisly,” he said of the movie. “Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.”
At The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy questioned the box office appeal of Fury, which he described as “a good, solid World War II movie, nothing more and nothing less.”
He wrote: “Rugged, macho, violent and with a story sufficiently unusual to grab and hold interest, it’s a modern version of the sort of movie Hollywood turned out practically every week back in the 1940s and 1950s.
“Today, and because it stars Brad Pitt in what deserves to stand as an emblematic performance, it seems like a bigger deal, and the film’s mild case of pretentiousness in the climactic stretch is its one notable problem. Whether women flock to see Pitt playing a brutal, war-hardened but wise soldier is a question, but guys will have no trouble jumping on board for this rough ride through the final phase of the war.”
Mick LaSalle of SF Gate singled out one scene in Fury.
“Every year, movies give us a handful of perfect sequences, scenes that are so good that they can become part of the landscape of our minds. In Fury, we find one such scene,” he wrote.
Fury is “raw and real and terrifying and disturbing and, of course, illuminating,” said Bruce Kirkland of QMI Agency.
“Fury — even though it is a meticulously researched fiction that seems to have all the period details down right — is as contemporary and fresh and important as films such as Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.”
Kirkland said the cast is “exceptional” and singled out Pitt for giving ” a career-defining performance.”
But he was no fan of the “bombastic and overwrought music score.”
Kirkland wrote: “Fortunately, the music is not a film-killer. Fury is still a brutally honest portrayal of men at war.”
Scott Mendelson of Forbes said Fury is an “un-engaging” movie but not necessarily a bad one.
He, too, praised the cast.
“All of these actors are completely committed, and really there isn’t a rotten performance in the whole film,” wrote Mendelson. “But these are not well-developed characters.
“Considering that the film is relatively light on action and purposefully light on plot, there is little to hold our attention in-between splashes of sudden and gruesome violence.”
Newsday critic Rafer Guzman liked the action sequences and said Ayer “does a good job of putting us inside the tank.”
But, Guzman opined, “what rings false are the hastily sketched characters and the big, obvious ideas they symbolize.
“Fury is bloody, brutal and occasionally entertaining, but it’s also full of baloney.”
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