Dir:

David Ayer

With: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman

Runtime: 134 minutes

DAVID Ayer's drama about a tank squad sweeping through Germany as the Second World War thunders to a close arrives with a great deal of sound and fury. You may have heard about its no holds barred style, its commitment to authenticity, its willingness to go further and farther than previous war films. If tanks ran on hype, the titular Fury could have gone three times around the world by now.

Starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a Sherman tank crew, Ayer's picture certainly has swagger, and the director of End Of Watch and Training Day shows he has lost none of his ability to deliver stirring action scenes and taut, testosterone heavy drama. But engaging as it is, as a war movie, a film showing the horror of battle and the barbarity of up close and personal combat, Fury cannot hold a remembrance candle to Saving Private Ryan.

The opening scene stamps the tone for what is to follow. In a landscape littered with the casualties of battle, both mechanical and human, Pitt, playing an American soldier known as Wardaddy to his men, leaps from a tank to despatch an enemy with brutal force and speed. This is Brad, tank commander (as opposed to any fella named Gary you might have heard of), in action. Having fought his way through Africa and now Europe, Wardaddy is in no mood for delay in bringing the war to an end and heading home.

Most of the platoon he started with have been killed, and now the chiefs are sending him boy soldiers as replacements. The barely shaving Norman (Logan Lerman) is a typist, no less, but now he has to join the battle-hardened crew in the tank and start killing. He is about to go through a day-long crash course in war that will change him utterly and forever. "Don't get too close to anyone," Wardaddy warns him.

The rest of the crew comprises Bible (Shia LaBeouf), Gordo (Michael Pena, End of Watch), and Travis (Jon Bernthal). Together, this band of brothers have been through hell together, and it is not over yet as pockets of resistance have to be swept clean, one booby-trapped road and hostile village at a time.

Ayer does not leave too long between action scenes, filling the air and screen with the sound of guns blasting and bullets flying. There is one fundamental problem, though: in the mud of Germany, tanks move relatively slowly. So slowly, indeed, that soldiers can run behind them in full battle kit. This makes for scenes in which bullets whizz but tanks trundle. Audiences used to ridiculously fast car chases will find it an odd sight.

Further putting a drag on proceedings is Wardaddy's love of a good old saying and general speechifying. "We're not here for right and wrong," he tells the kid. "We're here to kill them," is one of his, together with "Ideas are peaceful, history is violent". For a man supposedly running on empty physically, emotionally and spiritually, he is as reflective as a professor in a tutorial.

As for the violence, there are gruesome shots of limbs being sliced in two by bullets, heads being blasted apart, and other horrors. But the film has a 15 certificate, after all. War, it might be imagined even by those of us lucky enough to have never been in one, is a strictly 18 certificate affair.

Further adding to the edge of unreality is a sequence straight out of the Alamo, and a scene involving two German women that gives the opportunity for the crew to tell yet more war stories, thereby slowing the film further, and for Pitt to take his shirt off.

None of this detracts too much from what is a stoutly built, solidly gripping action picture with not a duff performance from anyone. Pitt and Lerman are especially good. But while Fury attempts to show the heroics of battle, and the damaged minds that result, it lacks the heart that made Saving Private Ryan so memorable. Where Spielberg's film made the audience weep, Ayer's picture sets out to rouse, only partly succeeding in its mission.

War remains hell, end of story.