"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, 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 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 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 the man was responsible for the deaths of children.

‘FURY’ Rated: R Opens Friday

These killings are staged with an air of grim necessity, and 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 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.

Review by A.O. Scott, New York Times

© 2014 The New York Times Company