By Brett Blake FURY As I think back on it, director David Ayer’s FURY is a film I appreciate and admire more than I actually like or enjoy. On a sheer technical level, it’s very accomplished, and the picture it paints of warfare is, in all likelihood, quite accurate, a side effect of which is a kind of coldness that keeps the audience at an arm’s length. Telling a rather straightforward tale of a tank crew making their way deeper into Germany in the waning days of the Second World War, FURY benefits from five quite strong performances. Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal do fine work as the more larger-than-life personalities in the group, and Shia LaBeouf is surprisingly affecting (and seemingly always on the verge of tears) as the most religious member of the team. Brad Pitt is convincing as the hard-ass leader (though we do get some glimpses of his true internal feelings), and Logan Lerman give the performance of the film as the meek, very green new soldier who is thrown in with the tank crew. As you can probably sense from reading those descriptions, all of the characters are pretty much stock “types” that you can find in any war movie, and there’s no real surprise to be found in what happens to any of them, or how their relationships develop. Lerman’s character, in particular, has an arc than anybody who’s ever seen another war film should be able to predict within the first minute of his screentime. That said, Lerman does do a terrific job of selling the character’s journey, however hackneyed and overplayed it might be. I called the film’s premise straightforward, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in the sense that there are no subplots, no convoluted plot mechanics to distract from the visceral, hard-hitting impact the movie is aiming for; it’s a curse in that there’s a distinct lack of any kind of propulsion to the narrative. We move from scene to scene, moment to moment, on an almost arbitrary basis, and it is only in the final third of the film that our protagonists are given any sort of concrete “mission.” Up until then, we basically just follow them patrolling deeper into the German countryside. Tonally, FURY is tightly-regulated. It presents a very grim look at the soul-crushing realities of what this particular war must have been like for some of the men fighting it. While it is beautifully shot (and features some quite haunting imagery), there’s a dirtiness to the look, a sense of everything covered in grime, that is very effective. The violence is highly grisly and unflinching, and the dialogue has a terse, hard edge which underscores the feeling that we’re watching what is potentially a very dire situation. And on top of it all, we have the tank combat sequences, which are remarkably staged and edited so as to be quite frightening and intense. The movie resists the temptation to sentimentalize (in fact, I’d call it a spectacularly unsentimental film) any of what we witness, which is admirable, but it does create a situation wherein the characters are hard to fully engage with and like. There’s no emotional hook, and for all the tension mined by the filmmakers, it’s hard to really care about the characters as people. But, I suspect that is a purposeful choice. Director Ayer seems more concerned with dropping the audience into this scenario in a way which will shake the viewers. That’s a valid approach, and though I don’t think the movie is any sort of masterpiece (due to that coldness; perhaps “ruthlessness” might be a better word for it), it certainly does succeed at giving its viewers a powerful, visceral experience. THE JUDGE Anchored by two great performances (one of which is flat-out tremendous), THE JUDGE is a somewhat messy - though undoubtedly entertaining - tale of family dysfunction, small town relationships, and legal entanglements. Centrally, the premise is this: Robert Downey Jr. stars as hot-shot defense lawyer Hank Palmer, who is called back to his hometown after the death of his mother. Being rather severely estranged from his father (Robert Duvall), needless to say he’s not thrilled to be back home, but when his father (who is a well-respected judge) is accused of murder, Hank finds himself in the position of having to defend him. Downey Jr. is terrific fun to watch as the slick, big city lawyer returning to his old stomping grounds; if I'm being completely honest, it does at times feel as though we're watching RDJ playing Tony Stark playing the character in this film, but there's enough added dramatic heft to his interactions with his father that it feels distinct enough. As the titular judge, Robert Duvall completely owns the film as the tough, stubborn title character, and watching him come to blows with Downey is a treat. Duvall plays the material with a level of emotion that I, frankly, was not expecting, and it is an Oscar-worthy performance from him. That is not hyperbole - he’s that good in the movie. The central duo are backed up by some fine, well-calibrated performances from the likes of Vincent D'Onofrio, Vera Farmiga, and Billy Bob Thornton, each of whom make the most of characters who - on the page - are fairly one-note. Thornton, in particular, does a lot with very little screentime to sketch out an interesting variation on the “asshole prosecutor” character type we’ve all seen before in other courtroom-themed films. There's also a strong thematic hook for the film - involving letting go of past actions and regrets - that hits home with a surprising amount of power in the third act, and the whole package is bolstered by a fine (if very much the kind of thing we've heard from him before) score from Thomas Newman. All of that is good, but the movie is not without flaws; it's probably twenty minutes too long, as we spend an awful lot of time on some digressions/subplots that ultimately don't add much to the central narrative of the Downey/Duvall relationship. For example, Vera Farmiga (who, as I said, is very good in the movie) is engaged in a subplot that is of quite minor overall significance, and there could have easily been a cut of the film in which her character is excised, an editing choice which would change nothing about the overall effectiveness of the central father/son relationship. Also, the movie finds itself pulled between three separate styles of movie: it's an intense family drama, it's a courtroom thriller, and it's a small town comedy. Each of these individual elements work really well on their own, but they occasionally don't feel "of a piece" with the others. That may be a bigger problem for some than for others, but I do think that another draft of the script to tighten things up and to really hammer down the tone would have elevated THE JUDGE from the "good" to "great" category. However, as it stands, it's solid entertainment with a nice amount of sentimentality featuring two phenomenal actors hashing things out… none of which is a bad thing.
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