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.
Fury's violent decapitations and exploding torsos feel exploitative or, worse, uninteresting, because the film never quite earns the dramatic stakes it strives for.
While these orgies of violence are staged with tense, gruesome precision, they don't convey much beyond what we already know. Namely, that war is hell. Message received.
It's an "unflinching" account of war -- "unflinching," in quotes, because every moment of the film is composed to grind your face into the muck and be proud of itself for doing so.
