Film Review: Fury (2014)

Much of Fury can be described as a ham-handed, badly acted and poorly-written rehash of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. The action sequences (with one notable exception) are impressively noisy and bloody, even gripping at times, but at it's heart this is a western, the kind in which our American heroes/gunslingers have to face off against hordes of Mexicans or Native Americans in a final climactic battle. Think of it as The Wild Bunch with tanks.

The tank commander, "Wardaddy", is played by Brad Pitt. It's a preening, scenery-chewing performance that shows what happens when a megastar isn't held in check by the director. Pitt doesn't create a character, he strikes a variety of poses and attitudes from every macho action film he's ever seen. The script does him no favours because he, along with the other four members of the tank crew, are products of a special key on the lazy scriptwriter's keyboard; it's a function key that automatically creates macho male characters who swear, argue, brawl, bicker, swear, spit, swear, kill, swear, weep copiously over the deaths of buddies (with extra swearing), drink hard, and finally die in a Twilight of the Gods firefight. It's homoerotic porn for gun nuts. David Ayer, the writer and director, goes the extra mile by making his main characters so frantically manly and tough they become loathsome. Aside from the wet behind the ears newbie, the rest of crew, including Pitt's character, are just cursing windbags of testosterone-addled idiocy. In a bit of clunky writing Ayer tries to explain their bestiality by saying that their long service at the front has brutalized them. OK, that was almost an original thought forty years ago. We get it, David, war is hell and you don't win battles with Boy Scouts. Moving on...

Fury would be just another slack-jawed action movie but for one notably offensive sequence that lumbers on stage at about the halfway point. Our "heroes" have taken a small German town, and Wardaddy and the newbie, called Norman, force their way into a home occupied by a woman and her teenaged female cousin. The threat or prospect of rape hangs heavy in the air. That's fine, because history tells us Allied troops did rape German women; not to the degree invading Russian troops did, but it certainly happened. The women are clearly terrified that one or both of them is going to be assaulted. Instead, Wardaddy, who speaks German, tells the older woman to cook for them. A short time later, however, Wardaddy tells Norman to take the young girl into the next room and screw her or he'll do it. A semi-reluctant Norman goes into a bedroom with the girl and does some kind of half-assed palm reading on her. She doesn't speak English and Norman doesn't have any German, but she's evidently so charmed, so smitten by these few seconds of interaction with her potential rapist she happily and enthusiastically has sex with him. WTF? What we have here is a rape fantasy, plain and simple. The female character is being coerced/forced into sex, but because her rapist shows a molecule of charm, she magically becomes eager for sex. And just to complete the fantasy aspect, the girl is gorgeous. The terrors and privations of Germany in 1945 haven't diminished her lingerie-model good looks one iota.

This sour, nasty scene is followed by a finale in which a couple of hundred SS troops launch an assault on Fury (the tank's name) and her crew. Wardaddy and Co. are all that stand between the Germans and an Allied supply depot. This action setpiece fits comfortably with your father's idea of what a World War Two movie should be like: the Germans lineup in an orderly fashion so that the good guys can mow them down in the most efficient manner possible. The Germans must have been scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel in 1945 because these guys have less tactical sense than the average paintball player. They stand in the open and fire rifles and machine guns at a tank. A tank! And then they look surprised when they're blown to smithereens. This last battle is doubly disappointing because some of the earlier tank fights are quite well done. Oh, well. At this point I was just grateful that I was seeing almost all the crew members meet a bloody end.

Book Review: Murder in Memoriam (1984) by Didier Daeninckx

France's conflict in Algeria from 1954-62 is to French culture and history what the American Civil War and Vietnam are to America. It's a conflict that was exceedingly cruel and bloody, and almost led to a coup d'etat in France. Needless to say, writing or talking about this war within France can still raise hackles across the political spectrum, and it's only in the last twenty or so years that France has really begun to have some honest conversations about its involvement in Algeria.

Murder in Memoriam is an agitprop murder mystery. The plot is about the apparently senseless murder of a university student, which, as it turns out, relates directly to the murder of his father twenty years previously. The father was killed on the night of October, 17, 1961, in Paris during the protests by Algerians for Algerian independence. But the goal of the novel is to throw some light on the brutal crimes perpetrated by the Paris police and the government against the protestors. It's estimated that perhaps 300 of these people were shot down in cold blood, beaten to death, or handcuffed and thrown into the Seine to drown. It's a massacre that wasn't spoken about for years in France, and, according to the introduction, this book eventually led to the man who was Prefect of Paris at the time being put under investigation. He was found to be a war criminal who had enthusiastically helped the Nazis round up Jews in France. He went to trial, was found guilty, and sent to prison.

Daeninckx's book works quite well as a mystery, and his Inspector Cadin is an enthusiastic and engaging detective, but the author's real purpose is to rip off the scab that's formed over France's memories of October 17/61 and the role of French citizens in the Holocaust. It's a tall order, but he pulls it off neatly, never sounding preachy or didactic. Algeria is still a hot button topic in France. A film made about the October 17 massacre a few years ago (the title escapes me) shied away from showing just how bloody it was. And a film called Days of Glory (2006) gives France's Algerian colonial troops, called Goumiers, the full Saving Private Ryan treatment for their role in the Second World War. This turns out to be a whitewash job as revealed in Jame's Holland's book on the Italian campaign. It's clear that the French, like any ex-colonial power, have an extreme reluctance to confront the crimes of the past. And for my dual review of two excellent Franco-Algerian themed films, The Battle of Algiers and The Day of the Jackal, click here.