Metacritic reviews

Fury is a good, solid World War II movie, nothing more and nothing less.

Any Hollywood gloss has been scoured away: the plot is raw, episodic and wholly unsentimental; a gruelling onward rumble from one brush with death to the next.

This isn't disposable popcorn entertainment, or a winking “war” film like “Inglourious Basterds.” Ayer's aim here is a film that will stick, and stick with you. And he achieves it.

The film's best moments are those focused on combat, and Ayer does a tremendous job of creating the details of daily life for a combat tank team in the waning days of WWII.

Fury is a punchy, muscular action film, confidently put together and never anything other than watchable.

Brad Pitt pulls along this gutsy, old-fashioned World War II epic by the sheer brute force of his charisma.

It's not the most complex WWII movie you'll see, but there's no denying the blunt intensity of Fury, and even if it doesn't sustain, Ayer commits to staring straight into hellish eye of war and bringing audiences along to witness every gruesome detail.

The film itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview.

Though colorfully embellished with authentic detail and logistically complex to bring to the screen, Ayer’s script is bland at the most basic story level, undermined by cardboard characterizations and a stirring yet transparently silly climactic showdown.

Writer-director David Ayer’s brash, assaultive Brad Pitt drama manages some evocative imagery and achieves visceral impact by enacting a hellacious atmosphere that never lets up — but Ayer takes the mission too literally, and winds up literally lost in the fog of war.