"WAIT till you see what a man can do to another man," a veteran American soldier solemnly tells a clean-faced new arrival at the start of this excruciatingly bloody World War II drama, and the wait is not long.
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Mass graves, executions, heads turned to a fine pink mist and shredded bodies are all quickly prominent in David Ayer's movie.
Light relief? Try corpses glowing around the shrapnel wounds of phosphorus rounds.
In the titular Sherman tank – the name is painted on the gun barrel – you don't get a nickname till you've taken many lives.
So Brad Pitt's commander Don Collier is "Wardaddy", Shia LaBeouf's righteous Boyd Swan is "Bible", Michael Pena's driver Trini Garcia is "Gordo" and Jon Bernthal's seething loader Grady Travis is "Coon-Ass".
Logan Lerman's neophyte – and the audience surrogate – is simply Norman Ellison.
Fury makes clear that however noble you may want to believe a war is – and nothing tops vanquishing Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany – the execution is terrifyingly ugly and soul-shattering.
You kill and you keep killing until someone kills you.
Even in April 1945, with the Allies on German soil and children conscripted to oppose them, there is no respite.
Ayer has been writing and then directing about men in various forms of combat for almost 15 years.
He understands the destructive faith of camaraderie, and the ritual of confinement.
Like Pena and Jake Gyllenhaal in a police car in 2012's End of Watch, the lumbering tank's grizzled crew enact their favourite conversations as a way of keeping it together.
The actors, especially LaBeouf, are solid.
There are traces of the two World War II films from 1998 that now define the genre: the metaphysical chaos of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line and the crushing combat of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.
But Fury eventually exults in the violence it initially deplores, with the once-innocent Ellison taking grim delight in machine-gunning whoever crosses his path.
It becomes a simpler film the further it goes on, with a long, antagonistic scene that builds out of the rest of the crew finding Collier and Ellison temporarily residing with two German women (Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg), giving way to a mission against the odds and a final stand.
It may be the most capably directed of Ayer's five feature films, and has a shuddering physicality, but it's also the most predictable.
Fury is screening at the Arcadia Cinema.
