Fury
Columbia Pictures | Release Date: October 17, 2014 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
64
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 47 Critic Reviews
Positive:
29
Mixed:
17
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleOct 16, 2014
At its best, Fury examines the psychological experience of warfare. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliOct 18, 2014
In a way, Fury and 1970's "Patton" could be considered companion pieces. Both deal extensively with tank warfare but from different perspectives. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonOct 16, 2014
Fury is a guided tour through a manmade hell. Read full review
83
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerOct 17, 2014
Brad Pitt gives one of his best performances as Sgt. Don “Wardaddy” Collier, a tank commander with a passion for killing Nazis. Read full review
80
Total FilmJames MottramOct 22, 2014
Loud, intense, violent, relentless, Fury doesn’t stop until the credits roll, thanks to Ayer’s cracking direction and a committed cast. The best WW2 movie in some time. Read full review
80
The New YorkerDavid DenbyOct 19, 2014
Fury is literally visceral— a kind of war horror film, which is, of course, what good combat films should be. Read full review
80
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottOct 17, 2014
It's an engrossing film, rich with action and emotion. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranOct 16, 2014
What makes this film distinctive is the adroit way it both subverts and enhances old-school expectations, grafting a completely modern sensibility onto thoroughly traditional material. Read full review
80
CineVueEdward FrostOct 16, 2014
The film is a bravura depiction of the harsh brutalities of war that, though monotonous, is an entirely rousing entry in the annals of great WWII cinema. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierOct 16, 2014
Fury excels in showing the ground-level, guttural intensity and claustrophobia of battle. Read full review
80
SalonAndrew O'HehirOct 14, 2014
Like Ayer’s cop flicks, Fury is a gripping ride all the way through, if somewhat restricted in its emotional and visual range. Read full review
80
TheWrapJames RocchiOct 10, 2014
This isn't disposable popcorn entertainment, or a winking “war” film like “Inglourious Basterds.” Ayer's aim here is a film that will stick, and stick with you. And he achieves it. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinOct 10, 2014
Any Hollywood gloss has been scoured away: the plot is raw, episodic and wholly unsentimental; a gruelling onward rumble from one brush with death to the next. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyOct 10, 2014
Fury is a good, solid World War II movie, nothing more and nothing less. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaOct 17, 2014
Although it's pretty much impossible to avoid the cliches and constructs of a war movie, Ayer pushes his actors to find the adrenalized fear, and fire, in their guts. Pitt brings "Wardaddy" alive in ways that put his cartoonish "Inglourious Basterds" Army lieutenant to shame. Lerman's rabbity dread is palpable. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter TraversOct 16, 2014
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. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperOct 16, 2014
Pitt is at the top of his game, playing a man who has forgotten whatever he used to be and has wholly embraced his role in this war. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedOct 15, 2014
It never scales the cinematic heights or reaches the same groundbreaking level as "Saving Private Ryan," but it’s intensely ferocious and relentlessly rough on the senses. You’ll know you’ve been to war, and not on the Hollywood front. Read full review
75
USA TodayClaudia PuigOct 15, 2014
Fury does capture the brutality of war and the misery of life spent largely confined in an armored tank during the war's final weeks, in April, 1945. Read full review
75
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreOct 15, 2014
It’s good, not great, and it’s not Ayer’s fault that the rarer these B-movies become, the more we expect from them. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianMarc MohanOct 15, 2014
David Ayer's film is a gory, muddy, downbeat tale of war's hellishness and the fraternal bond between those stuck in the middle of it. It's also, like "Ryan," full of tense, grippingly staged action scenes that capture moments of pure adrenaline, and it's the tension between those two impulses that makes "Fury" fascinating and ultimately flawed. Read full review
70
TimeRichard CorlissOct 16, 2014
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. Read full review
70
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonOct 16, 2014
World War II is often called the “last good war,” which has also meant that it was the last global conflict out of which the studios could make an unabashedly heroic movie. Fury is not that movie. And because it is not, it provides a few psychic disturbances beyond its shocking gore, burning soldiers blowing their brains out, children hanged from trees by the SS and imminent rape. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottOct 16, 2014
Within this gore-spattered, superficially nihilistic carapace is an old-fashioned platoon picture, a sensitive and superbly acted tale of male bonding under duress. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzOct 15, 2014
Ultimately Fury is a good, conventional war movie that might have become something more. Read full review
67
HitfixDrew McWeenyOct 10, 2014
The film's best moments are those focused on combat, and Ayer does a tremendous job of creating the details of daily life for a combat tank team in the waning days of WWII. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy BurrOct 16, 2014
Ayer, who has dealt with charismatic bad boys before — he wrote the script for “Training Day” and directed the sharp police drama “End of Watch” — makes the paternal “Wardaddy” into a figure both monstrous and upstanding. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsOct 16, 2014
A handful of revisions, tweaks and adjustments, along with a musical score less bombastically grandiose, might've made this a film to remember. Read full review
63
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanOct 16, 2014
It’s engaging and watchable, even as it marches toward a seemingly suicidal climax. Yet the complex dynamic between Wardaddy and his men is far more fascinating. Read full review
60
EmpireIan NathanOct 20, 2014
A persuasive, warts-and-bolts depiction of warfare from the guts of a tank yoked to an overwrought, sub-Private Ryan account of innocence under fire — so a hit and a miss. Read full review
60
The DissolveNathan RabinOct 16, 2014
Fury lives up to its title with its great ferocity, but at a certain point, it begins to feel like a macho fantasy. Read full review
60
Time Out LondonCath ClarkeOct 10, 2014
Brad Pitt pulls along this gutsy, old-fashioned World War II epic by the sheer brute force of his charisma. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawOct 10, 2014
Fury is a punchy, muscular action film, confidently put together and never anything other than watchable. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyOct 15, 2014
It’s all very Peckinpah — or at least it could be, if Ayer had any sense of poetry. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyOct 15, 2014
Pitt, for instance, could've used a scene like Tom Hanks' in "Saving Private Ryan," where we learn something — anything — about his life back home and what he's fighting for besides the Stars and Stripes. Instead, Fury (the title comes from the name of the tank) just plods from one brutal, bloody combat scene to the next. Read full review
58
The PlaylistKevin JagernauthOct 10, 2014
It's not the most complex WWII movie you'll see, but there's no denying the blunt intensity of Fury, and even if it doesn't sustain, Ayer commits to staring straight into hellish eye of war and bringing audiences along to witness every gruesome detail. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comPeter SobczynskiOct 17, 2014
It doesn't take long to realize that writer-director David Ayer has spent more time adding flesh to his battlefield sequence than he has in fleshing out the screenplay. The end result, while technically impressive, is a dramatically bloodless affair, despite the gallons of gore on display. Read full review
50
New York PostKyle SmithOct 16, 2014
But for all its 21st-century special effects, the characters, dialogue and values of Fury are straight out of the ’50s. The 1650s, maybe. Read full review
50
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallOct 16, 2014
Fury reeks of self-importance, a strange arrogance for a fictional World War II drama drenched in more blood than ideas. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezOct 16, 2014
Fury aims for history, and the contrived resolution shows a timidity by Ayer that is uncharacteristic of his previous work. Still, the action sequences, which use actual vintage tanks and little CGI, are pretty extraordinary and, at times, incredibly gruesome. War is hell. That’s entertainment, folks. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovOct 15, 2014
Fuller’s film is inarguably a stone-cold classic of the genre, but Fury, for all its cacophonous chaos and half-crazed characters, never quite reaches the shellshocked heights required to make it a bona fide pillar of cinematic combat. Read full review
50
Village VoiceAmy NicholsonOct 14, 2014
This is an ugly part of an ugly war, and Ayer wallows in it. Instead of flags and patriotism, Fury is about filth. Read full review
50
IndieWireEric KohnOct 10, 2014
Writer-director David Ayer’s brash, assaultive Brad Pitt drama manages some evocative imagery and achieves visceral impact by enacting a hellacious atmosphere that never lets up — but Ayer takes the mission too literally, and winds up literally lost in the fog of war. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineJesse CataldoOct 10, 2014
The film itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview. Read full review
50
VarietyPeter DebrugeOct 10, 2014
Though colorfully embellished with authentic detail and logistically complex to bring to the screen, Ayer’s script is bland at the most basic story level, undermined by cardboard characterizations and a stirring yet transparently silly climactic showdown. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinOct 17, 2014
The revulsion that Steven Spielberg maintained to the end of "Saving Private Ryan" is nowhere in sight — Ayer betrays his own values with a climax that’s like a hack gamer’s recreation of Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch." The final encounter between Ellison and a German soldier is meant to offer humanist balance, but in context it’s ludicrous. You can’t believe Ayer thought he could get away with it. Read full review
38
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Geoff PevereOct 16, 2014
Fury is a war movie with balls of steel and marbles for brains. Read full review
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