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Movie Review: ‘Fury’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “fury.”.

By A.O. Scott

Oct. 16, 2014

“We’re in the killing Nazis business. And cousin, business is a-booming.” So said Brad Pitt (in the person of Lt. Aldo Raine) in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” Five years later, and nearly 70 years after World War II, Mr. Pitt returns to combat in “Fury,” playing the leader of an American tank crew fighting its way across Germany in the spring of 1945. His character, Sgt. Don Collier (nicknamed Wardaddy), is a wearier, less garrulous fellow than Raine, and the film’s director, David Ayer, has a more linear and literal sensibility than Mr. Tarantino, but the business of Nazi killing remains brisk.

And why shouldn’t it be? The world is a complicated place, and war, as a subject for novels and movies, often presents a tangle of moral ambiguity and a fog of confusion. But while the Allied fight against Germany may sometimes raise thorny questions about ends and means, it also retains an ethical clarity, a righteousness, that at least partly accounts for its durable appeal among commercial filmmakers and their audiences. Nazis are just about the only real-world figures who consistently merit the fates reserved, in other genres, for zombies, aliens and orcs.

The first time we see Mr. Pitt in “Fury,” he leaps from his tank, tackles a German officer and stabs him through the eye. Then he calms the dead man’s beautiful white horse and sets it free across the battlefield. Later, he will order the summary execution of an SS officer who has just surrendered, after confirming that the man was responsible for the deaths of children.

These killings are staged with an air of grim necessity, and Mr. Ayer, a hard-boiled screenwriter ( “Training Day” ) and action director (“Sabotage,” “End of Watch”) venturing into ambitious genre territory, has a way of filming violence that is both intense and matter-of-fact. Like many other post- “Saving Private Ryan” combat movies, this one emphasizes the chaotic immediacy of battle, staking its claim to authenticity on the unflinching depiction of bloodshed: Heads are vaporized by mortar rounds. Limbs are severed by bursts of automatic-rifle fire. Human flesh is charred by flames and shredded by shrapnel.

But within this gore-spattered, superficially nihilistic carapace is an old-fashioned platoon picture, a sensitive and superbly acted tale of male bonding under duress. Wardaddy — an archetypal squad leader, tough and quiet, with sad eyes that testify to the terrible things he’s seen — is in charge of four other men, and the long hours they spend together, in constant danger and the limited space of the tank, result in an atmosphere of rough and unpretentious intimacy.

The men under him are the kind of motley, semi-diverse assortment that usually anchors this genre. Gordo (Michael Peña), who is Mexican-American, and Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal), from somewhere in the American South, disguise their loyalty to each other in profane insults and occasional bursts of bigotry. Bible (an excellent Shia LaBeouf), while he occasionally lets fly an obscenity or two, is more apt to quote Scripture and warn his comrades about the wages of sin. There is a tenderness between him and Wardaddy that is one of the film’s subtlest and most intriguing touches.

Pvt. Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), who has yet to earn a nickname, serves as both the smooth-faced newbie — afraid of dying and appalled by the callousness of his comrades — and as the crew’s designated egghead. Transferred from the typing pool, he reads Hemingway and plays classical piano, and is clearly more sensitive than the others, who are cut from coarser cloth and have been further battered by grueling campaigns in North Africa, Italy and Normandy.

Now, with the war in its endgame, they face a vicious and desperate enemy. In their retreat toward Berlin, the Nazis have taken to conscripting children and murdering uncooperative parents. With his military collapsing on both the Eastern and Western fronts, Hitler has ordered a suicidal last stand of total destruction. The Germans still have plenty of tanks, though, many of them superior to those of the Americans, and while momentum is on the side of the Allies, victory still seems far away.

“Fury,” which takes its title from the name painted on the barrel of the tank’s big gun, is less an epic than a series of tense and focused episodes. It’s about the grind of tactics rather than the sweep of strategy, the struggle for local objectives rather than ultimate goals. The battle scenes are staged with blunt, ground-level virtuosity, and with a welcome regard for spatial and visual coherence. When the tank needs to cross an expanse of muddy ground, you feel every jolt and swerve. And there is a lot of muddy ground to cover.

There is also a brief respite, during which Mr. Ayer pauses to consider the humanity of the soldiers and the extent to which it has been tested and damaged by war. Wardaddy and Norman discover two German women (Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg) hiding in an apartment in a newly captured town, and the encounter is both delicate and terrifying, a dysfunctional family dinner in the midst of a nightmare. It gestures toward a conflict that is bigger and deeper than the war itself — the struggle, among and within individuals, between savagery and civilization, decency and raw need.

And then it’s time to move on and get back to the business at hand.

“Fury” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Slaughter and swearing.

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Fury (2014)

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Review: In Fury , Brad Pitt Wins World War II, Again

Correction appended: Oct. 16, 2014

“Done much killing?” tough Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) asks winsome newbie Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman). “No,” Ellison answers timidly. “You will,” the big guy spits out.

He’s not kidding. Fury , writer-director David Ayer’s war film to end all war films (fingers crossed), begins with Wardaddy killing a German cavalry officer with a knife, then cutting his eye out as a souvenir. It ends, a draining two hours and 10 minutes later, in a battle that makes the Alamo look like a pie dessert — à la mode.

This is War Movie 101: all fighting, nearly all the time. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down pictured a similarly unrelenting siege (Somalia), as did, in a fantasy landscape, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Rohan). Saving Private Ryan traced an American unit’s trajectory across World War II–era France, and Platoon and Full Metal Jacket , once that film got past the fatal hazing of basic training, submerged the viewer in the Vietnam nightmare as seen by its edgy American invaders. Fury doesn’t come close to the achievement of those edifying cinematic ordeals, let alone to Samuel Maoz’s harrowing Israeli film Lebanon , which summoned a claustrophobic psychopathy by setting virtually all its action inside an Israeli tank. But Ayer’s movie has the admirable ambition of showing how even the Greatest Generation could brutalize and be brutalized by war.

Brad Pitt, you’ll recall, already won World War II in Inglourious Basterds . Hell, last year he won World War Z . So how can he and the near victorious GIs of the 2nd Armored Division be established as underdogs in a movie set in Germany in April 1945, just a few weeks before Hitler would blow his brains out in a bunker? Ayer’s solution: put ’em in a tank, where their rumbling weapon was far outclassed by the enemy’s. Henry Ford produced the Americans’ thin-skinned Sherman tank; Ferdinand Porsche designed the Germans’ much larger, sturdier Tiger. It was, essentially, the Tin Lizzie vs. the Mercedes-Benz Super Sport.

And though World War II would shortly end, the U.S. soldiers couldn’t take it easy, like college seniors in the final term before graduation. Their mission was to roll through Germany, whose Nazi leaders called for every citizen to fight the invaders to their death. To the Americans, each person they meet is a potential sniper; every man, woman and child is cannon fodder. Some of the soldiers became efficient killing machines. Some of them may have liked it.

Norman, who looks about 12 and takes most of the movie to grow stubble on his sweet peach face, doesn’t like killing, doesn’t want it and, when he’s drafted as Wardaddy’s gunner, doesn’t know how to do it. His first job is to scrape the remains of his predecessor off the insides of the tank, nicknamed Fury. He is the token innocent, the audience surrogate, almost the girl joining a quartet of grizzled veterans.

Because their characters are reduced to their religious, ethnic or lowlife stereotypes, they may as well be called Bible (Shia LaBeouf), Mex (Michael Peña) and Animal (Jon Bernthal). Their tour has taken them to hell and halfway back, which makes them the rude tutors in Norman’s life-or-death indoctrination. “The war’s gotta end, soon,” Wardaddy says, in one of the boilerplate truisms that serve as this movie’s dialogue. “But before it ends, a lotta people gotta die.”

Sometimes, even a little death is a lot. Conquering one village, Wardaddy and Norman enter a house that holds two frightened young German women, Emma (Alicia von Rittberg) and Irma (Anamaria Marinca, star of the Romanian prize winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days ). Irma makes lunch for Wardaddy, who sends Norman off to the bedroom with Emma in what may be their mutual deflowering. The assignation is meant to be tender, but the viewer has to wonder if Emma (or for that matter, Norman) is a willing participant, and if the scene doesn’t carry the lingering toxicity of sexual violence. Then the other tank troopers barge in, and Animal uncorks a flood of insults that amount to assault. By velvet glove or iron fist, barbarism rules.

That, Ayer would argue, is just war, daddy. And in staging his big battle sequences, he brings Fury to fitful life. The attack of three Shermans on a giant Tiger is choreographed for maximum impact, as is the looming face-off between Wardaddy’s crippled tank and about 300 SS troops marching toward it. Pitt, who at 50 still looks great with his shirt off, has the gruff charisma to play a dauntless soldier with killer courage and a vestigial streak of humanity.

He carries a film that could stumble under the burden of its clichés. You know that when one character who’s chomped out bits of Norman’s callow butt for most of the movie finally makes gentle amends, he’ll be the next to die. And that another character, having faced death countless times by German fire or misadventure, will survive through an act of enemy kindness. World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and Fury occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.

The original version of this story misspelled the name of Brad Pitt’s character. It is Don “Wardaddy” Collier.

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Tank warfare in the final days of World War II sounds like primo escapism for action freaks. Fury, written and directed with exacting skill and aching heart by David Ayer ( End of Watch ), doesn’t let us off easy with vid-game violence. Ayer thrusts us into the furnace of the Fury, a Sherman tank commanded by Don “Wardaddy” Collier ( Brad Pitt ), until we feel as battered as the crew.

In their years with Sgt. Wardaddy, gunner Boyd Swan (an outstanding Shia LaBeouf), loader Grady Travis (Jon Bernthal) and driver Trini Garcia (Michael Peña) have tilted their moral compass to view murder as different from killing the enemy. They don’t even see the blood on their hands until the arrival of Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a rookie driver unprepared for combat. Norman’s horror and disgust are a cracked mirror for the crew, until Norman hardens just like his band of brothers. Ayer captures the buried feelings of men in combat with piercing immediacy. Pitt is tremendous in the role, a conscience detectable even in Wardaddy’s blinkered gaze. But it’s Lerman who anchors the film with a shattering, unforgettable portrayal of corrupted innocence. Fury means to grab us hard from the first scene and never let go. Mission accomplished.

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Fury first look review – Brad Pitt's punchy, muscular videogame of a war movie

Brad Pitt leads a tank crew into Germany in the dying days of the second world war in this watchable thriller that is less realistic that it supposes

Shia LaBeouf slashed face for second world war drama Fury

D avid Ayer’s war movie features Brad Pitt as a grizzled US tank commander leading a dirty half-dozen or so sweaty, brutish but basically golden-hearted GIs into the heart of the Fatherland after D-Day, part of the Allies’ western front campaign to gain control of Germany. They’re rumbling into a world of pain, fighting field by field and hedgerow by hedgerow against an enemy now intent on defending its own territory with desperate fanaticism. The clanking, cramped tank has become home to these men, and they have christened it “Fury”: the word is daubed on its gun barrel. It sums up what they are dishing out to the Germans, and to each other.

There are dashes of both Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds – though as influences, those movies are less important than second world war-themed first-person shooter games like Call of Duty and Brothers in Arms. With its gruesome violence and gore, it certainly looks very different to a movie like Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far from 1977 on a similar subject, but with a rather loftier officer’s-eye-view. Fury is a punchy, muscular action film, confidently put together and never anything other than watchable – though closer to this director’s previous macho adventure Sabotage, and not his more thoughtful movies like End of Watch or Harsh Times . It has some pretty outrageous cliches and the attendant impression of realism is compromised in the big, central scene when the guys gather for an austere meal with some conquered civilians. It’s a sentimental moment which in terms of history and sexual politics looks about as real as a 17 Reichsmark note.

Brad Pitt himself is a figure of hard-won authority; nicknamed Wardaddy, he is a laconic veteran of the African and European campaigns and he has picked up some of the German language, learning enough to have imbibed a hatred of the Nazis, and become grimly intent on executing SS officers where they can be captured as prisoners of war – a Tarantinoesque touch. The men under his command are the sternly religious “Bible” Swan, played by Shia LaBeouf; the sweaty and truculent Grady, played by Jon Bernthal (Brad the Quaalude King from Wolf of Wall Street); the stoic Gordo, played by Michael Peña; and finally a hapless new gunner called Norman, a terrified kid played by the baby-faced Logan Lerman.

Norman has landed in their laps due to a surreal piece of bureaucratic bungling: he is a typist and office worker with no combat training. Norman’s incompetence might well get everyone killed: something to add to the fact that they are already outnumbered and outgunned by the Germans hereabouts. The awful truth that these men must face is that they will almost certainly die at the very moment of Allied victory.

Ayer makes a decent stab at summoning up the weird mixture of endless boredom and waiting in war, with nothing to do but nurse grudges and quarrels with your own comrades – punctuated with moments of exhilaration and fear. He conjures the ambient horror of trundling through the German countryside where locals have been hanged by the authorities for showing cowardice: one woman has been lynched with a sign around her neck: “I didn’t want to let my children fight”. Absolutely everyone has been pressed into military service by the Reich, and there is a sharp moment when, after narrowly winning a vicious shootout in one town, Pitt’s men come face-to-face with who they have been fighting.

The false note comes with Lerman’s character Norman, and his relationship with Wardaddy. We all know what happens to scared boys in war films, and how their character is going to change. Pitt’s character is keen to get this boy’s cherry popped, in a couple of different ways. But the combination of violent revenge with gallant sensitivity to the female civilians is naive and unconvincing.

In the end it’s a contest for underdog status, and Brad Pitt’s men seem destined for their own self-conscious Alamo or Little Bighorn showdown in the German countryside, even though it’s technically the Germans who are having their General Custer moment. Ayer gives his movie a fervour and energy which takes it beyond a videogame. But only just.

Full coverage of London film festival 2014
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Common sense media reviewers.

Extremely violent but very powerful tale of WWII tank crew.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The movie is largely about teamwork and working to

The characters are skilled, confident soldiers, an

Shocking, realistic violence. Heavy shooting, and

An American soldier and a German girl disappear in

Strong language includes several uses of "f--

Characters smoke cigarettes regularly (accurate fo

Positive Messages

The movie is largely about teamwork and working together -- although friction among the five men always leads to imbalance and fighting. But the movie also leads viewers to ponder the horrors of war and the wartime attitude that it's perfectly OK to kill your enemies, even if they're human beings with families.

Positive Role Models

The characters are skilled, confident soldiers, and they work together as a team, fighting for their country. But since the movie takes place during the final months of WWII, the killing seems more wasteful and damaging than it does heroic. Even though these men may be heroes, parents may want to think twice before offering them up as role models.

Violence & Scariness

Shocking, realistic violence. Heavy shooting, and high-powered weapons blow off soldiers' heads and limbs. Blood runs everywhere, in splatters and streams. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dead bodies shown; piles of bodies are bulldozed out of the way, and tanks run over dead bodies in the mud. A rookie is made to clean up a bloody mess inside the tank, which includes half of a man's face lying in a puddle of blood. Nazis use children in battle; some are killed. A character is killed with a knife. Dead, hanged bodies are shown. A woman is briefly shown slicing up the carcass of a horse.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

An American soldier and a German girl disappear into a bedroom for consensual sex. They kiss, but nothing else is shown. Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) is shown shirtless. Occasional strong verbal sexual innuendo. Pinup pictures (non-nude) are occasionally shown inside the tank and in other places.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes several uses of "f--k," plus "son of a bitch," "s--t," "bastard," "a--hole," "t-ts," "motherf----r," "p---y," "whore," and "c--ksucker."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters smoke cigarettes regularly (accurate for the time period). Characters share a green bottle of what looks to be whisky, taking huge slugs from the bottle. The bodies of several wealthy Germans are shown lying among many open bottles; they're said to have got "drunk as lords" and then killed themselves.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Fury is an extremely violent World War II drama about a tank crew stationed in the middle of Germany during the final months of the war. Heads and legs are shot off, gruesome body parts are shown, and there's lots of splattering, flowing blood and hundreds (or possibly even thousands) of dead bodies. A young American soldier disappears into a bedroom with a German girl; they're shown kissing, and sex is implied, but nothing is shown. The men exchange plenty of strong innuendo, and some non-nude girly pictures are shown. Language is quite salty, with several uses of "f--k," plus "s--t," "a--hole," "son of a bitch," etc. Characters occasionally smoke cigarettes in a background way (accurate for the '40s setting), and in one scene, they share a bottle of what looks like whisky. The movie -- which stars Brad Pitt -- manages to be dramatic and exciting without being preachy, and older teens and parents may come away with their own ideas of what war is really about. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Kids say (31)

Based on 15 parent reviews

Violent and bloody and always feels like it's on the verge of devolving into chaos, similar to war.

What's the story.

In the final days of World War II, American tank crews are stationed deep within Germany, just barely hanging on until the war ends. Commander "Wardaddy" ( Brad Pitt ) has a gift for keeping his men alive -- although they recently lost one, and a rookie (who's been trained for office work), Norman ( Logan Lerman ), is ordered to join them. At first, the rest of the crew ( Michael Pena , Shia LaBeouf , Jon Bernthal ) resents him. But after a series of attacks and battles, small victories and big losses, they eventually bond and learn how to work together and respect one another. They're put to the ultimate test when their tank hits a land mine, and they end up stranded in enemy territory.

Is It Any Good?

The cinematography and editing here are striking. Ayer color codes the bullets' paths so that incoming and outgoing are easily identified, and the interior workings of the cramped tank are given remarkable clarity without the use of explanatory dialogue. The device of the "rookie" character is a little worn, but then this entire movie harkens back to a simpler age, when war movies were made by tough guys; when they feel pain, it really matters.

Though he has a few duds on his resume, writer/director David Ayer is best known as the writer of Training Day and the writer/director of End of Watch , two movies that focus on the detail-rich workday of cops on the street. After a pause for a disappointing action flick, Sabotage , he's back in that same vein with the FURY. And rather than using his small, focused story to heavily underline themes about the horrors of war, Ayer simply follows characters and moments, letting viewers draw their own conclusions.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Fury 's extreme violence . How realistic is it, and how does that affect you? How does the impact of this kind of violence compare to what you might see in a horror or superhero movie? Why do you think the filmmakers chose to show the violence in this way?

Why do we watch war movies? What lessons are there to be learned today about a war that happened many decades ago?

How do the characters cope with being in such an extreme, horrific situation? Do they react in negative ways? Positive ways? Would you consider any of them role models?

How much teamwork is shown here? How do the characters work together? When do they not work together, and how does it affect the team?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 17, 2014
On DVD or streaming : January 27, 2015
Cast : Brad Pitt , Michael Pena , Logan Lerman
Director : David Ayer
Inclusion Information : Latino actors
Studios : Columbia Pictures , Sony Pictures Releasing
Genre : Drama
Topics : History
Run time : 134 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong sequences of war violence, some grisly images, and language throughout
Last updated : May 8, 2024

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Fury (United States/United Kingdom, 2014)

The first thing I noticed was the mud. Even more than the copious blood and violence, it represents the defining visual element of Fury . It's everywhere. Feet are caked with it. Tires and treads churn it under. Roads - if they can be called that - are paved with it. Rarely has a World War II film depicted just how filthy everything was during the 1945 slog across Germany's rural country on the race to Berlin. If writer/director David Ayer is to be credited with nothing else, he gets this right, illustrating that, unlike what's shown in less historically exacting war films, the final push for the Allies was no post-D-Day picnic.

In a way, Fury and 1970's Patton could be considered companion pieces. Both deal extensively with tank warfare but from different perspectives. Patton provides a top-down view of battle - one of the strategist gazing from afar and moving pieces around on a chessboard. For the controversial general, engagements were less about Shermans against Tigers than him against Rommel. Fury takes us down to the mud, into the heart of the "purple heart boxes." This is an intense movie, with taut, expertly depicted tank battles and a believable sense of camaraderie among the characters. It flouts as many war movie tropes as it embraces and, because Ayer doesn't play by all the rules, there are times when it's unpredictable.

In his famous speech to the Third Army, Patton said the following: "Some of you boys, I know, are wondering whether or not you'll chicken out under fire. Don't worry about it. I can assure you that you will all do your duty. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly. When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do." This is one of the themes of Fury ; it shows how the experience of war can harden a man, transforming even the most timid clerk into a killing machine.

Fury introduces us the crew of a Sherman M4 tank making its way across Germany in April 1945. Led by their tough-as-nails sergeant, "Wardaddy" Don Collier (Brad Pitt), they are Bible-thumping Boyd Swan (Shia LaBeouf), pugnacious Grady Travis (Jon Bernthal), and immigrant Gordo Garcia (Michael Pena). The fifth seat in the tank, tragically vacated, is filled by typist-turned-gunner/driver Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), who is as unenthused about being with the four as they are about having him there. During its quiet moments, the movie offers snippets of the sometimes fractious interaction between the tank-mates. There are also five or six engagements (including one in which three Shermans square off against a bigger, more advanced German Tiger) and an interlude in a captured town.

As good at the battle sequences are (and they're very good), Fury 's best moments occur during that interlude. In it, Don and Norman find two women hiding in an apartment. They lock the door behind them. At that juncture, it's unclear how things will proceed. Although Don is a heroic type, the film has already shown how war's cold tendrils have changed him. A merciless quality has broken through his personality (illustrated when he shoots a prisoner in the back). There's uncertainty about how this encounter will resolve, and an uncomfortable tension that is could turn ugly. Would Don participate in a rape (or worse)? Without bullets or blood, this fifteen minute segment represents a suspenseful pinnacle for Fury as it peels away layers of the characters to expose things about who they are. Then it's back into the field.

Brad Pitt's Don is a toned-down version of the character he played in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds . Don is just as determined and uncompromising but far less gung-ho. He lives by a code of honor with principle #1 being to keep his men alive. Principle #2 follows Patton's directive about killing Nazis. In particular, he has no sympathy for the SS. The only good one is a dead one and it doesn't matter if he has surrendered. Pitt is believable in this role; the actor vanishes into the character. Logan Lerman doesn't have Pitt's screen presence but he fills the role of the clerk-turned-warrior capably. His character has the longest and most extreme arc. Shia LaBeouf, who may or may not have retired from acting after this performance, fulfills the promise that once had Hollywood insiders predicting great things from him. Michael Pena and Jon Bernthal fill out the quintet.

Ayer (the writer of Training Day and the writer/director of End of Watch ) does almost everything right in Fury . He captures the grotesque side of war without completely removing the heroic element. This isn't two hours of the Saving Private Ryan Normandy Beach sequence but it has a similar sensibility: the meaning of war to those on the front lines and in the trenches is "survival." It's kill or be killed. Looking for something more lofty than another day of life is left to the generals, strategists, and politicians. The tank battles are presented with as strong a sense of verisimilitude as there has ever been in a World War II film (with only a limited reliance on special effects). Fury offers sufficient down time to develop the characters but not so much that it causes the pace to become sluggish.

Is this an Oscar contender? It's hard to say considering the Academy's sometimes bizarre choices. This is a memorable motion picture, accurately depicting the horrors of war without reveling in the depravity of man (like Platoon ). Equally, it shows instances of humanity without resorting to the rah-rah, sanitized perspective that infiltrated many war films of the 1950s and 1960s. It's as good a World War II film as I've seen in recent years, and contains perhaps the most draining battlefield sequences since Saving Private Ryan .

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DVD & Streaming
Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

October 17, 2014
Brad Pitt as Sgt. Don 'Wardaddy' Collier; Shia LaBeouf as Boyd 'Bible' Swan; Logan Lerman as Norman Ellison; Michael Peña as Trini 'Gordo' Garcia; Jon Bernthal as Grady Travis

Home Release Date

January 27, 2015

Distributor

Columbia Pictures

Movie Review

They call him Wardaddy .

But Sgt. Don Collier doesn’t take it as a comment on his age. Or as an insult. It’s just his nickname, a label that each member of a tank crew earns.

Collier’s comes from the fact that he’s commanded this motley assortment of soldiers for a long time. They were killing Germans in North Africa way back when. They fought through Italy and Normandy. And years later, they’re still all fighting together, making their way across Germany in the waning days of World War II.

It’s the spring of 1945, and you can feel that this nasty war is in its endgame. But there’s still a lot of fighting to be done. And it’s more dangerous now than ever. The enemy is desperate, in retreat and setting up for a suicidal last stand. And even though Hitler may have had to start forcing children into the battle to bolster his troops, the German army still has plenty of tanks, brutal beasts of war more heavily armored and powerful than anything the Americans can field.

That, however, won’t stop Collier’s crew. With a new private manning the bow gun, they’ll be giving more than they get. Sure, that Norman kid is green—afraid of dying and even more afraid to pull a trigger—but they’ll knock him into shape. Once he gets an eyeball of what war can do, when he sees what horrors one man can do to another man, he won’t be dragging his feet on killing any more.

After all, they scrawled Fury on the barrel of their M-4 Sherman’s big gun for a reason: Collier and Co. plan on delivering the full fury of the American fighting machine ’til every last villainous German is dead and gone!

Positive Elements

World War II has often been idealized in film. Not so here.

“As black and white as the conflict was—this struggle of good vs. evil—liberating Europe from slavery, no less, people assume the fighting was also black and white. It wasn’t. It was just as morally hazardous and spiritually toxic as anything that happened in Vietnam,” director David Ayers said in a chron.com article. To that end, Pvt. Norman Ellison is our everyman onscreen representative who, early on, balks at and struggles against the cruelty and borderline criminal actions of his battlefield compatriots. He even offers to die himself rather than murder an unarmed prisoner.

Even though Norman’s attitudes shift by movie’s end, he, Sgt. Collier and the rest of his crew stick by one another and heroically defend an important military objective. Elsewhere, a German officer inexplicably lets a captured American soldier go rather than killing him.

Spiritual Elements

When Norman first shows up, he’s grilled by another tank crewman about his salvation. We find out that this guy, nicknamed Bible , is a “fundamentalist Christian.” We see him praying over a wounded soldier and quoting Scripture several times before battle. That said, his faith doesn’t keep Bible from being every bit as foulmouthed, boozy and death-dealing as the rest of his crew. In fact, he rationalizes that relishing the slaughter of the enemy is a positive thing since it’s “God’s work.” He intones, “I am the instrument, not the hand.”

Norman, we find out, is a Presbyterian. His faith informs his initial hesitation with regard to following in his crewmates’ crude and deadly directions. But he tosses those convictions aside fairly quickly in the bloody heat of battle.

For his part, Sgt. Collier generally scoffs at the idea of God’s hand being involved in their lives, even though he later demonstrates some knowledge of the Bible by quoting from the book of Isaiah.

Sexual Content

While traveling in their tank, Norman sees a pretty young woman on the side of the road. One of his fellow crewmembers points out that she would likely have sex with him for a candy bar. That statement is borne out later when women readily accept small payments and accompanies soldiers for offscreen trysts. In a captured German town, Sgt. Collier takes Norman up to the apartment of two women. He pays food and cigarettes for Norman to share the younger woman’s bed behind closed doors. (It should be noted that this is not played as either prostitution or rape, but as an absurdly scripted romantic moment for both Norman and the German girl.)

While helping a woman up on his tank, a soldier hikes up her skirt. There are jokes about “whores” and performing sex acts with Hitler.

Violent Content

“I didn’t want a typical narrative,” director Ayers said. “If you look at film, it’s like it goes from Pearl Harbor to Saving Private Ryan and then the victory parade. But the Germans held on until the bitter end. Four weeks from the end of the war, there were some horrific things going on.”

Fury takes every chance it can to show those horrific things in red-slimed detail. Scores and scores of men, women and children are battered and butchered for the camera—and us—to see.

For example, in the film’s opening scene, Sgt. Collier surprises a German officer, knocks the man off his horse and repeatedly stabs him in the face, gouging out an eye. Later, a tank gets hit with an incendiary device that sets it and its occupants ablaze. One man tumbles out, covered in flames as he gorily shoots himself in the head to stop the agony. When Norman first arrives, he’s ordered to clean out the seat of his recently killed predecessor. While mopping up the blood, he also finds sizeable remnants of the man’s blown-off face.

Among the film’s many other grisly images, we see: heads blown apart by machine guns and tank shells, corpses crushed under tank treads, German children hanged for refusing to fight, prisoners shot while surrendering, a soldier’s skull crushed by an attacker’s boot, child soldiers mowed down by gunfire, men blown into chunks by grenades, military vehicles erupting in explosions, buildings and the people in them demolished by artillery fire, the corpses of a group of German officers and women who apparently committed suicide together, and bulldozers pushing piles of bloodied bodies.

While brutally ripping their way through an overwhelming enemy battalion—and waiting for their own deaths to inevitably occur—Sgt. Collier and his crew all profess that killing Germans is “the best job I ever had.”

Crude or Profane Language

One can’t help wonder if life in a WWII-era tank was really as vulgar as the rampant profanity in this film suggests. Well over 100 f-words and a dozen or so s-words pepper the crew’s dialogue, along with multiple uses of “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “h—” and “a–hole.” God’s and Jesus’ names are profaned about 15 times each, with the former being combined with “d–n” at least a dozen times. Crude terms are assigned to female body parts; we hear one extremely vulgar reference to oral sex.

Drug and Alcohol Content

When the soldiers aren’t killing people in this pic, they’re puffing on cigarettes and downing anything that might dull their senses. We see them guzzle wine, beer and various bottles of hard liquor. Most get pretty drunk on a stopover in a German town. Sgt. Collier sums up the general attitude toward these things when he pulls out a hidden flask before a battle and says, “Might as well get a little tight. Won’t be around for the hangover.”

Other Negative Elements

Sgt Collier’s crew is a loyal group, but they routinely batter one another with insults and racial slurs. We watch Norman vomit after he makes a bloody discovery.

“Ideals are peaceful, history is violent,” Sgt. Collier tells a horrified and recoiling Norman Ellison.

This movie wants to make sure we know that, smell that and chew on that phrase. In fact, Fury rubs our cinematic faces in two hours of grimy, dirty, intensely ferocious, charred-flesh misery to make sure the point comes through is crystal clear fashion.

Some will see that unflinching glimpse at perpetual bloodshed and gray-smoking destruction as something of an antiwar declaration. They’ll see a cautionary tale of men hollowed out and broken by the unspeakable horrors they’ve witnessed.

Others will see this pic as a one-dimensional splatter-fest dressed up in khaki Army fatigues, with limbs innumerable being severed by large-caliber machine gun fire and mortar rounds in a story of brutal, hard-fisted soldiers battling a Nazi evil even more wicked than themselves.

Everyone will be right. The film’s creators crafted it that way on purpose. But no matter which interpretive path you take, what seems inarguable is how profanely foul, excruciatingly graphic, unwaveringly nihilistic and downright ugly it all remains.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ Review: The Origin Story of Furiosa Has Dazzling Sequences, but George Miller’s Overstuffed Epic Is No ‘Fury Road’

Anya Taylor-Joy plays the title hellion as a heavy-metal Candide bouncing through the Wasteland, but despite some awesome action moments (and two mega villains), the feeling is one of inflated franchise overkill.

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The first thing to say about “ Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ” is that it’s not like any other “Mad Max” film. The movie, which runs 2 hours and 28 minutes, is teemingly, sprawlingly, phantasmagorically ambitious. Where “Mad Max: Fury Road” was set over three days, “Furiosa” takes place over 15 years and tells the origin story of Imperator Furiosa in five chapters (which come with titles like “The Pole of Inaccessibility”). The film has a cast of thousands of depraved hooligan bikers with rusty weapons and rotten teeth. At times, it feels like they’re getting ready to gather for Wasteland Woodstock.

Popular on Variety

Most people would say “The Road Warrior” is greater. But “Mad Max,” in its cruder low-budget way, had a down-and-dirty B-movie virtuosity. “The Road Warrior” was bigger and grander. I decided — this was part of the fun of the game — that the greatest “Mad Max” film was whichever one you happened to be watching.

A few years later, Miller, perhaps high on his own legend (a syndrome that’s more or less built into being a visionary filmmaker), made “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (1985), a threequel that had some splendid things in it — Tina Turner, the Thunderdome showdown — but that also turned into an inflated Jungian fairy tale about “saving the children” (a good idea in life, but not so often in movies). It wasn’t a terrible film, yet the series felt cooked, spent, diminished. It seemed as if “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior” were too bravura in their drive-by nihilism to keep extending. Miller had made the two greatest action films of all time, and he moved on to other things.

But that, of course, wasn’t the end of the story. In a world of recycled IP, “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), released 30 years later, did the impossible. It revived the series at full intensity, sweeping memories of “Beyond Thunderdome” under its spectacular wreckage, and creating a heroine — Charlize Theron’s hellacious buzzcut Furiosa — who was every bit as full-throttle commanding as Mel Gibson’s Max. True to her name, the film was so fast and furious that your eyeballs had to learn how to watch it, to follow the ballistic micro edits. But when you got onto the wavelength, the black magic of the “Mad Max” world was back. It was an epic desert drag-race miracle, a sequel worthy of the first two films — and, in that sense, maybe the third greatest action film ever made.

So what does one do for an encore to that ?

“Furiosa” tells the story of how its title character grows up, how she goes from being an innocent village girl, raised in the Green Place of Many Mothers (where she’s already daring enough to sever the fuel hose on a stranger’s motorcycle), to a kidnapped waif to a resourceful orphan who passes herself off as a boy to a devious hellion who bounces back and forth between dueling postapocalyptic underworld empires: that of the Warlord Dementus ( Chris Hemsworth ), the long-haired-and-bearded ruler of the Biker Horde that first absconds with her (leading them, Dementus rides in the chopper version of a “Ben-Hur” chariot); and that of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the ancient, gas-masked, white-maned cult leader of the Citadel, the colony of white-faced fighter disciples who Furiosa was trying to escape from in “Fury Road.”

“Furiosa,” by contrast, is a picaresque with a stop-and-go rhythm, as the young Furiosa goes from the frying pan into the fire, like a heavy-metal Candide, forming attachments through her survival instincts but never sticking with anyone for long. She’s a lone wolf in a world of scoundrels. Theoretically, that’s easy to understand, but a movie, almost by nature, needs to be about the forging of bonds. And “Furiosa,” as populated as it is with disposable warriors (and characters with names like Scrotus and Toe Jam and The Octoboss and The People Eater and War Boy), feels alienated and a touch impersonal. The film seems more invested in Miller’s elaborate and, at moments, overly digitized extensions of the Wasteland than in the people who inhabit it. In that way, it’s got a touch of Marvel-itis.

The film seems all but designed to show off its world’s-end locations — the Citadel, the skull-faced cliff we already know well, and Gas Town, a petrochemical jungle surrounded by a giant moat, and the Bullet Farm. There’s one spectacular action sequence. It’s plunked into the center of the movie, and it involves a gleaming silver two-section tanker, with a jagged whirring read-end doohicky, the entire thing built out of spare parts, as it speeds along the desert blacktop with rogue bikers attacking it from all sides. We’ve been here before, but it’s sensationally gratifying to be here again: in the unholy thick of speed and murder, with warriors now dying by incineration.

Yet it’s never a good sign, at least in a “Mad Max” movie, when your most dazzling set piece comes in the middle. “Furiosa,” like “Beyond Thunderdome,” wants to be something loftier than an action blowout, but the movie is naggingly episodic, and though it’s got two indomitable villains, neither one quite becomes the delirious badass you want.

When the young Furiosa, played by Alyla Browne, is first captured, we think horrible things are going to happen to her. She is zoomed across the nighttime desert, where the gnarly biker who nabbed her plans to inform Dementus of the oasis she came from (which, in the Garden of Eden opening sequence, looks civilized enough to be the Whole Foods of the apocalyptic afterworld). But then Furiosa’s mother shows up to rescue her — a ruthless warrior named Mary Jo Bassa (Charlee Fraser) who knows how to repair and ride a Thunder Bike and is willing to die to protect her cub.

Then too, there’s something a bit off about how the movie comes close to cushioning the evil of Immortan Joe. This is a ruler who presides over a sick sect of suicide killers, and who extends his royal line by maintaining a harem of sex-slave wives. We know all this from “Fury Road,” of course. But since Immortan Joe’s Citadel is the place Furiosa is destined to end up, the film goes a little easy on it. Immortan Joe and Dementus cut a deal over gasoline, and given how dastardly both of them are supposed to be, the battle between them should have been more lavishly twisted.

The scenes where Furiosa passes herself off as a boy aren’t quite convincing; you have to just go with them. Then she grows up, and Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role. She’s a powerful actor with a sensual scowl, but here, with hardly any words to speak, she’s at her most stoic. That seems on some level appropriate, especially when she propels herself through an entire road chase underneath a vehicle. But the character is more reactive and less hellbent than either Gibson’s Max or Theron’s Furiosa. For a while, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa forms a connection with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), a road warrior whose main lesson to her seems to be to wear blue greasepaint on their foreheads. Their partnership comes out of nowhere, then fades into nowhere.

More crucial: As much as I loved the character of Furiosa in “Fury Road,” do we really need to see her tangled, deep-dive-that-somehow-stays-on-the-surface origin story? It’s an impulse, at heart, that grows out of franchise culture, and maybe that’s why “Furiosa,” for all the tasty stuff in it, is a half-satisfying movie. Miller creates a volatile world to wander around in, and I suspect a number of viewers and critics will respond fully to that. But part of the genius of the “Mad Max” films is that when they’re pumping on all cylinders, even when they’re as grand as “The Road Warrior” and “Fury Road,” they are also, in spirit, as lean and mean as one of those lethal spiked jalopies zooming down the blacktop. In attempting to inflate his universe into something larger, Miller clutters it with pretension and makes it mean less. He takes his eye off the place where the rubber meets the road.

Reviewed at Dolby 88, New York (Cannes Film Festival, out of competition), May 6, 2024. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 148 MIN.

Production: A Warner Bros. release of a Kennedy Miller production. Producers: George Miller, Doug Mitchell.
Crew: Director: George Miller. Screenplay: George Miller, Nico Lathouris. Camera: Simon Duggan. Editors: Eliot Knapman, Margaret Sixel. Music: Tom Holkenborg.
With: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Lachy Hulme, Charlee Fraser, Angus Sampson, Alyla Browne, Daniel Webber, Nathan Jones, Gordon D. Kleut.

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‘furiosa: a mad max saga’ review: anya taylor-joy and chris hemsworth in george miller’s fitfully propulsive ‘fury road’ prequel.

Tom Burke also stars in this fifth entry of the post-apocalyptic action series that began 45 years ago with ‘Mad Max,’ this time churning up a Wasteland War.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Hate to be a grouch when legions of social media film bros are breathlessly worshipping at the altar of The Demi-God of Cinema, George Miller , but Furiosa is a big step down from Mad Max: Fury Road . Whereas the 2015 instant action classic had grit, gravitas and turbo-charged propulsion that wouldn’t quit, this fifth installment in the dystopian saga grinds on in fits and starts, with little tension or fluidity in a narrative whose shapelessness is heightened by its pretentious chapter structure.

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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review – Anya Taylor-Joy excels in stunning prequel

It rides into cinemas next week.

preview for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - Official Trailer (Warner Bros.)

Retreading the same road seems anathema to George Miller , so for his prequel to one of the greatest action movies of all time, he's gone epic. Gone is the relentless drive of Fury Road , and in its place is a character study that spans 15 years.

Sure, it's still the kind of movie that features a giant war rig with a set of swinging balls known as a Bommy Knocker, but that's Miller for you. There's nobody out there doing it quite like him, and you'll frequently be glad his quirky mind exists for us to enjoy.

To compare the two movies almost feels like missing the point. Furiosa could be better seen as a worthy companion piece to Fury Road , an epic odyssey that – when viewed together – will deepen your appreciation of what Miller has achieved across both movies.

Across five chapters, we watch Furiosa as she's taken from the Green Place of Many Mothers through her time with the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and eventually her place at the Citadel, ruled over by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, replacing the late Hugh Keays-Byrne).

What might surprise you going in is that Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't make her appearance as Furiosa until the third chapter. Alyla Browne takes on the role initially and impresses just as much as her older counterpart. From the get-go, you can see the intensity and rage bubbling below the surface from the Furiosa we knew in Fury Road .

It's a credit to the casting director Nikki Barrett that as the movie segues into the older Furiosa, it's a seamless transition. Taylor-Joy takes over for the third chapter The Stowaway, an astonishing 15-minute action sequence detailing an assault on the war rig run by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke).

The sequence is the closest Furiosa ends up feeling to Fury Road . It's a relentless set piece that mixes Miller's characteristic visual flourishes with extraordinary stunts, often ones that leave you wondering just how the hell they did it. Most impressively, you'll genuinely believe Furiosa is in danger despite knowing she survives – it's that intense.

anya taylor joy as furiosa, furiosa a mad max saga

It's far from the only action set piece in Furiosa , and they all have moments of wonder – Dementus' first attack on the Citadel goes hilariously badly for him thanks to War Boys with hooks – but they're not as regular as Fury Road . Often, the movie even resists them in favour of the central conflict between Furiosa and Dementus.

In every way, Dementus is Furiosa's opposite. He's verbose, flashy and a complete dirtbag, compared brilliantly by one character to "anus pus". Crucially, Chris Hemsworth imbues him with a charisma that makes his moments of brutal savagery all the more impactful. It's one of his finest performances.

The same could be said of Anya Taylor-Joy. Her captivating performance continues to showcase why she's one of the most exciting talents around, telling so much about Furiosa often with just her eyes. When Furiosa has her moments to externalise her rage, much like Charlize Theron did in Fury Road , Taylor-Joy wrings the moment for all its worth.

Miller teases the eventual face-off between Furiosa and Dementus at several moments, before finally giving us it in the last chapter. Even here, though, it plays out unexpectedly, with a more intimate nature. It's not the huge climax of Fury Road , but it's no less compelling and emotional.

anya taylor joy as furiosa, tom burke as praetorian jack and chris hemsworth as dementus, furiosa a mad max saga

If there's a flaw to be found in Furiosa , it's that it can at times feel both quite slow and too rushed. The chapter structure means that the story frequently jumps forward, especially so during the ultimate chapter, which, as Miller has said, leads straight into Fury Road . You're left feeling you haven't seen the whole story.

It's probably more a reflection that this world Miller has crafted is so engaging that you just want to see everything. Gas Town and Bullet Farm, only glimpsed in Fury Road , are seen in all their glory, and we're introduced to even more colourful characters like Rizzdale Pell (Lachy Hulme in a dual role) and Scrotus (Josh Helman, who also played War Boy Slit in Fury Road ).

Hopefully, if Miller gets to realise The Wasteland , set to tell the story of Mad Max before Fury Road , we'll see these characters again. As it is, you'll be a bit disappointed that Furiosa rushes to get to Fury Road when we'd happily watch another movie of Furiosa during her time at the Citadel.

So yes, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is not Mad Max: Fury Road . But it is another singular cinematic experience that needs to be witnessed.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is released in cinemas on May 24.

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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies , attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy , initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.

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Brian De Palma's "The Fury" is a stylish entertainment, fast-paced, and acted with great energy. I'm not quite sure it makes a lot of sense, but that's the sort of criticism you only make after it's over. During the movie, too much else is happening.

It's about two teenagers with paranormal powers. Sometimes they can control them, providing an ESP force that the United States government is very interested in as a possible weapon against the Russians. But sometimes the powers go out of control, because these are kids who've been messed with by scientists until they're emotionally unstable. And when they get mad, there's trouble.

De Palma's at his best when they get mad. He's a director in love with the bizarre, the paranormal, and the special effects necessary to create them. He had a lot of fun in " Carrie ," when Sissy Spacek tore apart houses and burned down the high school. He has as much fun here. When the Fury is with them, these kids start with simple little exercises like causing nosebleeds, and work their way up to literally explosive results.

"The Fury" stars Kirk Douglas as the father of one of the paranormal kids ( Andrew Stevens ). The kid is kidnapped by a CIA-like secret government agency, and spirited away to a top-secret resort where all sorts of luxuries (like Fiona Lewis ) are supplied if Stevens will cooperate. He's taken in at first by the phony stories fed to him by the evil federal agent ( John Cassavetes ) and the institute's staff ( Charles Durning and Carrie Snodgress ), but eventually he begins to get … restless. And when he gets absent-minded, it's everybody's problem.

Douglas, who used to be a government agent himself, attempts to get his son back, and discovers he has enemies not only on his trail but also at his destination. There's help, though, in the form of a young girl ( Amy Irving ) who also has strong ESP powers. He gains her trust, and finds himself trying to save her from the government, too.

De Palma's almost nonstop action carries the film along well (and distracts us from the holes in its plot), and Kirk Douglas was a good casting choice as the avenging father. In his best roles, he seems to be barely in control of a manic energy, and this time, being chased down the L tracks, he seems just right. Cassavetes always makes a suitably hateful villain (he plays the bad guys as if they're distracted by inner thoughts of even worse things they could be doing), and Carrie Snodgress, returning to movies after several years of voluntary retirement, is complex and interesting as the government employee who falls in love with Kirk Douglas.

Big-eyed and beautiful Amy Irving, vulnerable and tough at the same time, is just fine. She was Sissy Spacek's "friend" and final victim in De Palma's "Carrie," and I guess it's only fair that this time she gets to unleash the Fury in the final scene. Is it as scary as the final moment in "Carrie"? Not quite, but it'll leave your head spinning.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Fury (1978)

118 minutes

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Cannes: ‘Fury Road’ prequel ‘Furiosa’ forgets what makes the ‘Mad Max’ movies great

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When Australia’s George Miller came here in 2016 to serve as jury president, just months after his “Mad Max: Fury Road” won six Oscars, he swept in like a conquering hero. His movie was undeniable: a reinvigoration of both his career and the action genre. Often, the relationship between Cannes and the blockbuster directors it invites comes off as strained — see French artist Zaho de Sagazan serenading this year’s jury president Greta Gerwig at Tuesday’s opening ceremony — but with Miller, the moment felt right.

Things change. His “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (in theaters May 24), a somewhat dutiful new prequel to “Fury Road,” had its world premiere out of competition Wednesday, unspooling at the capacious Grand Lumière Theatre to a rapt audience that, it must be said, didn’t laugh once. “Who laughs at the end of the world?” you may ask. But that would be to deny Miller the richness of his grungy post-apocalyptic series, one that pairs brutal action sequences with emotional resonance, dark mythmaking, sociopolitical alarm and, yes, the odd Ozploitative chuckle at some catastrophic personal misfortune.

Director George Miller poses for a portrait on Wednesday, April 10, 2024 in Burbank, CA.

We strap in with director George Miller, the ‘Mad Max’ mastermind, back with ‘Furiosa’

Australia’s leading export of postapocalyptic mayhem, Miller reflects on 45 years of action, the lure of digital and the summer’s most anticipated blockbuster.

May 6, 2024

Some of that is in evidence in “Furiosa,” but nowhere near enough. For the first time in Miller’s now-five-film franchise, he seems to be falling shy of the immediacy he’s sustained, often deliriously, for an entire feature. Any prequel would necessitate a certain distance: This is what happened before the story you already know. And if you ever confused Charlize Theron ’s hollowed-out stare in “Fury Road” for a lack of backstory (that’s actually the performance you’re noticing), “Furiosa” is here to supply that material for you, not unentertainingly. But with every supersaturated blue sky, russet-colored desert shot and faux-literary chapter heading (“2. Lessons from the Wasteland”), the movie gets further away from feeling like a tale that’s happening, to one that’s already been told, cleaned up and prettified.

Miller still mounts a film more confidently than just about anyone on the planet, and his kickoff, a 10-minute, near-wordless chase, is the definition of getting off on the good foot. A ferociously protective mom (the wonderful Charlee Fraser) trails, on horseback and motorcycle, a gang of kidnappers who have fled with her preteen daughter Furiosa (Alyla Browne, expressive during the film’s first hour). The latter, while unfortunate to be caught, is resourceful in her own way, chewing through a fuel line and blessed with the benefit of an especially prescient name. Flung over the back of a bike, her long hair flowing in the wind, the shot brings to mind to another defiant woman in Miller’s 1982 “The Road Warrior.”

A word about that stone-cold classic: By dint of the technology that was then on hand (i.e., no digital effects and a nutso stunt crew), “The Road Warrior” throws you into bodily panic with every kinetic setup. “Furiosa” rarely feels dangerous. Too much of its blood and fire is the work of computers, and for the first time, that work is obvious. There’s something very un-“Mad Max” about this; the tactility of the earlier films fed into the realness of potentially surviving the fall of civilization, even if that meant coming face to face with a tyrannical Tina Turner .

But the punkish spirit of the young Furiosa — forced to sit in a cage like a sad pet — goes a long way to setting up our connection with the character. Less so her captor, Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth, who, though he tries hard to build an arm-swinging, cape-wearing, motormouthed swagger, doesn’t have the lines to give his gang leader the kind of vanity we could relish in a villain. Eventually we get those bleach-pale War Boys from “Fury Road” again, along with the monstrously masked Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), his thuggish mutant son Rictus (Nathan Jones) and a geographical trade war that’s a bit more complex than it needs to be.

Miller, who with co-screenwriter Nick Lathouris worked out these script details before they approached “Fury Road,” mainly have their sights set on a centerpiece that comes close to redeeming the entire film: a lavishly armed War Rig truck barreling down an endless highway, hounded by attackers with propellers strapped to their backs. Finally, the grandeur of the older movies is here, as is Anya Taylor-Joy , whose Furiosa has now gone through her Yentl-passing-for-a-boy phase and now seems meant to wear a glamorous black smudge on her forehead and learn everything she needs to know about “road war” from Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke of “The Souvenir,” channeling the Leone-esque minimalism that marked Mel Gibson’s original antihero).

Two people drive a truck in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

We have a lot to learn about road war as well. What’s a bommy-knocker? (I won’t spoil it, but generally, you pay extra for that option.) There’s a finding-your-calling film built into “Furiosa” — maybe it took the apocalypse for this former fruit-picker to discover what she does well — plus a hint of a front-seat romance that’s never made explicit. But just as the movie is hitting its stride and Simon Duggan’s cinematography settles down, Miller strays back to a less-exciting vengeance narrative.

Much has already been made of Taylor-Joy’s lack of dialogue — hardly a drawback when you take in her burning stares and see how potently she’s making something out of nothing. If the movie has a deficiency (and it does), it’s not one of exposition but euphoria. The “Mad Max” universe was never all that cautionary, not if you yourself ever wondered how you’d make it through societal meltdown and what kind of mohawk you’d get. The exhilaration of the polecats sequence in “Fury Road” — that fact that there’s such a thing as polecats — made the series a constant source of glee.

“Furiosa,” to its distinction and detriment, ends up being too self-regarding, too downbeat. It takes the fun out of survival. Miller’s imagination has fed into “The Last of Us,” “Fallout” and a host of other grayscale nightmares for movies and TV. He knows better than anyone that forward momentum is key to a “Mad Max” movie. Leave the prequels to those who don’t have any gas left in the tank.

'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga'

Rating: R, for sequences of strong violence, and grisly images Running time: 2 hours, 28 minutes Playing: In wide release Friday, May 24

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Critics are calling 'Furiosa' one of the 'greatest prequels ever made' — but not better than 'Fury Road'

"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" continues the franchise's high-octane action legacy.
Critics praised the movie's stunts and performances, but said it doesn't surpass "Mad Max: Fury Road."
Here's a roundup of what critics are saying about the movie.

"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" marks the fifth movie in George Miller's high-octane action franchise.

Following the success of 2015's "Max Mad: Fury Road," which took in over $380 million at the worldwide box office , "Furiosa" tells the origin story of one of the main characters from "Fury Road," Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa.

"Furiosa" follows the title character, now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, over a 15-year span as she journeys into the Wasteland and ultimately becomes a badass War Rig driver.

Now that the movie has had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, here's what critics are saying about the movie, Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth's performances, and whether it's as good as the beloved "Fury Road."

"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" opens in theaters May 24.

Critics praised the movie's action sequences

The "Mad Max" franchise is known for its extreme stunts and action sequences, and critics say there are plenty more to enjoy in "Furiosa."

"The movie is teemingly, sprawlingly, phantasmagorically ambitious," wrote Variety critic Owen Gleiberman , adding that it "contains a handful of awesome action moments."

Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't have a lot of dialogue, but that's not an issue

Taylor-Joy, the film's star, reportedly only has around 30 lines of dialogue in the movie, but the lead being mum shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who is a fan of the franchise. Mel Gibson, the original Mad Max, rarely spoke; same for Tom Hardy, who played Max in "Fury Road."

Critics say Taylor-Joy's lack of speech emphasizes her other qualities.

"[Taylor-Joy] is phenomenal," wrote John Nugent of Empire , "her big, intense eyes standing out starkly against her engine-oil-smeared forehead, emoting subtly in a dialogue-light role."

"The virtuosity of Miller's approach is so arresting that you might not even notice how seldom Furiosa actually speaks; like Charlize Theron before — or after? — her, Taylor-Joy conveys so much strength and desperation through the whites of her eyes alone that words would only cheapen the unparalleled purity of her purpose," wrote IndieWire's David Ehrlich .

Chris Hemsworth is impressive as the franchise's latest villain

Hemsworth plays the snarly bearded Warlord Dementus, the latest outlandish — and very buff — villain in the franchise.

"He's never had a villain showcase quite like this before, and what's so striking about it is how merciless it is; even with the occasional dropped hint at his tragic backstory, there's never a question of redemption for Dementus," wrote Liz Shannon Miller for Consequence . "It's genuinely fearless work."

One critic says it's one of the best prequels ever made

IndieWire 's David Ehrlich called the movie "one of the greatest prequels ever made" in large part because the Furiosa character is so captivating.

"Furiosa is reborn as the rare film character who's become iconic twice over in two distinct (but inseparable) forms, and future generations will awe at the fact that 'Fury Road' came first," he wrote.

But it's not as good as "Fury Road"

For all the praise "Furiosa" is receiving, many critics believe it doesn't surpass Miller's thrilling opus, "Mad Max: Fury Road."

"'Furiosa' is a big step down from 'Mad Max: Fury Road,'" opined The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney . "Whereas the 2015 instant action classic had grit, gravitas and turbo-charged propulsion that wouldn't quit, this fifth installment in the dystopian saga grinds on in fits and starts, with little tension or fluidity in a narrative whose shapelessness is heightened by its pretentious chapter structure."

"Scene for scene, 'Furiosa' is very much a complement to 'Fury Road,' yet the new movie never fully pops the way the earlier one does," wrote Manohla Dargis of The New York Times .

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How to watch the Fury vs Usyk live stream: Time, PPV price, and more

Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk on the 'Ring of Fire' poster.

Tyson Fury vs Oleksandr Usyk is finally here. This fight has been brewing since Usyk took Anthony Joshua’s belts in 2021, but rematches, injuries, and money talks have delayed the fight for years. But it’s officially here, and if you aren’t sufficiently hyped up, let’s break down why this is so important.

Watch Fury vs Usyk live stream on DAZN PPV

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The winner of this fight will be the first undisputed heavyweight champion since Lennox Lewis won the title from Evander Holyfield in 1999. Lewis was stripped of one of his belts after declining a mandatory fight, and no one has collected them all since. A big part of that is because of the Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Wladimir, who split the titles between them for over a decade and refused to fight each other out of brotherly love.

There has never been an undisputed heavyweight champion in the Four Belt Era. Fury won three of the belts when he defeated Wladimir Klitschko in 2015. He vacated them soon after, then he won the WBC belt in his trilogy with Deontay Wilder. Usyk snagged the remaining belts by defeated Anthony Joshua in 2021 and again in 2022.

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Both Fury and Usyk look good for this fight. At Friday’s weigh-in the fighters, normally nearly 50 pounds different, were closer in weight than expected. The shorter and lighter Usyk weighed in at 233.5 pounds, a good 10 pounds heavier than his average. Fury, on the other hand, slimmed down to 262. But the tale of the tape is still the giant Fury versus the nimble Usyk.

The Fury vs Usyk live stream is about to start, at 12:00 p.m. (noon) ET / 9:00 a.m. PT. The main event will likely start between 6:00 p.m. and 6:45 p.m., depending on the length of the undercard fights. It’s a PPV that will stream on DAZN and ESPN+. Here’s everything you need to know to watch boxing this weekend.

DAZN is one of the streaming sites hosting the fight. The PPV costs $70 and you’ll need a DAZN subscription. There are a few options for getting that subscription, although there is unfortunately no DAZN free trial . You can pay for a monthly subscription at $30 per month, a yearly subscription at $225 per month, or you can commit to a year’s subscription and pay in $20-per-month increments.

The Fury vs Usyk PPV is also available on ESPN+ for $70. Like DAZN, you’ll need an ESPN+ subscription. You can grab one for $11 per month, $110 per year, or through the Disney Bundle that includes Disney+ and Hulu. ESPN is the home of Top Rank boxing, so you’ll get to see several boxing events per month, most of which are not PPVs.

This PPV is available all over the world through DAZN. The prices change depending on which country you’re in. If you find yourself somewhere that doesn’t have access, you can always use one of the best VPNs to get around region locks. We recommend NordVPN because it’s simple, reliable, and almost always has great VPN deals . Just subscribe, sign in, connect to a server in the U.S., then buy the PPV on ESPN+ or DAZN.

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After falling behind 0-2, the Denver Nuggets now have a chance to close out the series early when they take on the Minnesota Timberwolves in Game 6 tonight at the Target Center. A win for Denver would make them just the sixth team in NBA history to win a series after losing the opening two games at home. A win for Minnesota forces a Game 7. The storylines are compelling either way, setting this up as a can't-miss game.

It's just about time for tip off, which is at 8:30 p.m. ET tonight. The game will be televised on ESPN, but we've done all the work on how to stream the NBA playoffs, so we're here with a bevy of different ways you can watch a live stream of the Nuggets vs Timberwolves Game 6. Watch the Nuggets vs Timberwolves Game 6 live stream on Sling TV

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COMMENTS

Fury movie review & film summary (2014)
Fury is a war film that depicts the brutal and realistic experiences of a tank crew in the final days of World War II. Roger Ebert's review praises the performances of the actors, the authenticity of the production design and the intensity of the action scenes, but criticizes the lack of a coherent story and the clichéd characterizations. Read his full analysis and rating of Fury on his website.
'Fury' Movie Review: Brad Pitt Killing Nazis Again
R. 2h 14m. By A.O. Scott. Oct. 16, 2014. "We're in the killing Nazis business. And cousin, business is a-booming.". So said Brad Pitt (in the person of Lt. Aldo Raine) in Quentin Tarantino ...
Fury
In April 1945, the Allies are making their final push in the European theater. A battle-hardened Army sergeant named Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt), leading a Sherman tank and a five-man crew ...
Fury review
Fury review - stirring, macho tank drama. Brad Pitt leads his tank crew through the horrors of Hitler's last stand in this graphic, action-packed war movie. T he spirit of Sam Peckinpah hangs ...
Fury (2014)
Fury: Directed by David Ayer. With Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña. A grizzled tank commander makes tough decisions as he and his crew fight their way across Germany in April, 1945.
Fury
Fury - Metacritic. Summary April, 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theatre, a battle-hardened army sergeant named Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) commands a Sherman tank and her five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Outnumbered and outgunned, and with a rookie soldier thrust into their platoon, Wardaddy and his men ...
Fury
Ayer's brief moments of pathos weigh far less on the viewer than his prevalent obsession with the violence and gore of war. Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 18, 2022. For Fury, the cast ...
'Fury': Film Review
By Todd McCarthy. October 10, 2014 10:00am. Fury is a good, solid World War II movie, nothing more and nothing less. Rugged, macho, violent and with a story sufficiently unusual to grab and hold ...
Fury review
Watch a video review of Fury Guardian. Brad Pitt's action movie about an American tank commander and his wearied crew in the final year of the second world war has topped the US box office, and ...
Fury (2014 film)
Fury is a 2014 American war film written, directed, and co-produced by David Ayer.It stars Brad Pitt with Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal as members of an American tank crew fighting in Nazi Germany during the final weeks of the European theater of World War II.Ayer was influenced by the service of military veterans in his family and by reading books such as Belton ...
Fury (2014)
Fury captures the horrors of war perfectly. trublu215 15 October 2014. Fury pits a tank filled with five American soldiers at the tail end of World War II as they struggle to fight off a small army of Nazi soldiers that are closing in on them. David Ayer directs this brutal and grim war film with no romance to it.
Fury Review: Brad Pitt Stars in World War II Epic
World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and Fury occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war ...
'Fury' Movie Review
Tank warfare in the final days of World War II sounds like primo escapism for action freaks. Fury, written and directed with exacting skill and aching heart by David Ayer (End of Watch), doesn't ...
Fury first look review
D avid Ayer's war movie features Brad Pitt as a grizzled US tank commander leading a dirty half-dozen or so sweaty, brutish but basically golden-hearted GIs into the heart of the Fatherland ...
Fury Movie Review
Positive Messages. The movie is largely about teamwork and working to. Positive Role Models. The characters are skilled, confident soldiers, an. Violence & Scariness. Shocking, realistic violence. Heavy shooting, and. Sex, Romance & Nudity. An American soldier and a German girl disappear in.
Mad Max: Fury Road movie review (2015)
Miller's new vision of Max isn't a warrior. Rather, he's a man driven by the memories of past sins to do little more than survive. He walks with the ghosts of those he couldn't save, and his traveling companions have pushed him to the brink of sanity. While wandering at this edge, Max is kidnapped and transformed into a literal blood ...
Fury
Fury takes us down to the mud, into the heart of the "purple heart boxes." This is an intense movie, with taut, expertly depicted tank battles and a believable sense of camaraderie among the characters. It flouts as many war movie tropes as it embraces and, because Ayer doesn't play by all the rules, there are times when it's unpredictable.
Fury
Movie Review. They call him Wardaddy. But Sgt. Don Collier doesn't take it as a comment on his age. Or as an insult. It's just his nickname, a label that each member of a tank crew earns. ... Fury takes every chance it can to show those horrific things in red-slimed detail. Scores and scores of men, women and children are battered and ...
Thoughts on "Fury" (2014)? : r/movies
3. 3 Sherman's. Only one Firefly. (Fury) One "original" 75 mm M3. (The "short" barrel) The other one seems to be the 76mm gun without muzzle brake which was not very accurate. Yes, it's a movie so it's not totally historically accurate but this part was more real then you think. The tiger was scary in its time.
FURY
See FURY in theaters everywhere! Get Tickets Now: http://bit.ly/FURYtixRelease Date: 17 October 2014 (United States)April, 1945. As the Allies make their fin...
The Fury
When a devious plot separates CIA agent Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) from his son, Robin (Andrew Stevens), the distraught father manages to see through the ruse. Taken because of his psychic ...
Furiosa Review: Mad Max Saga Prequel Is Dazzling but ...
'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' Review: The Origin Story of Furiosa Has Dazzling Sequences, but George Miller's Overstuffed Epic Is No 'Fury Road' Reviewed at Dolby 88, New York (Cannes Film ...
'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' Review: Anya Taylor-Joy Takes the Wheel
'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' Review: Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth in George Miller's Fitfully Propulsive 'Fury Road' Prequel. Tom Burke also stars in this fifth entry of the post ...
Fury movie review & film summary (2014)
The film may remind some viewers of the kind of thing that one might have seen on the bottom half of a double-bill in 1943—the storyline is trite and unsurprising, the dialogue is almost always just a little too on-the-nose, and the climactic standoff against the approaching Nazi forces feels too contrived for its own good.
Furiosa review
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review - George Miller is back with Fury Road prequel Furiosa and it proves a worthy prequel with Anya Taylor-Joy excelling.
The Fury movie review & film summary (1978)
The Fury. Brian De Palma's "The Fury" is a stylish entertainment, fast-paced, and acted with great energy. I'm not quite sure it makes a lot of sense, but that's the sort of criticism you only make after it's over. During the movie, too much else is happening. It's about two teenagers with paranormal powers.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Review
The outrageous stunts of Fury Road set a new standard for action filmmaking, as well as sky-high expectations for any subsequent Mad Max movies, and while Furiosa doesn't outdo its predecessor ...
Cannes: 'Furiosa' forgets what makes 'Mad Max' movies great
By Joshua Rothkopf Film Editor. May 15, 2024 9:28 PM PT. CANNES, France —. When Australia's George Miller came here in 2016 to serve as jury president, just months after his "Mad Max: Fury ...
'Furiosa' Reviews: What Critics Are Saying About the 'Mad Max' Movie
"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" marks the fifth movie in George Miller's high-octane action franchise. Following the success of 2015's "Max Mad: Fury Road," which took in over $380 million at the ...
How to watch the Fury vs Usyk live stream: Time, PPV price, and more
Watch Fury vs Usyk live stream on ESPN+ PPV. The Fury vs Usyk PPV is also available on ESPN+ for $70. Like DAZN, you'll need an ESPN+ subscription. You can grab one for $11 per month, $110 per ...

They’re Buddies, but as Coarse as the War Around Them

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Violent and bloody and always feels like it's on the verge of devolving into chaos, similar to war.

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