If you’re in the mood for a throwback war movie, then the new Brad Pitt film “Fury” is for you.

Set in the waning months of World War II, “Fury” follows a veteran crew of a Sherman tank battling behind enemy lines. The Allies may be on the verge of winning the war, but that just makes the Nazis all the more desperate. The dangerous mission deep inside Germany puts our rag-tag tanks up against near-impossible odds. This movie may feel old-fashioned, and it is, but it also provides the old-fashioned satisfactions of watching beleaguered men put up a good fight for a good cause.

Later American wars, especially Vietnam and the two Iraq Wars, lend themselves to a lot of morally ambivalent cinema. But there’s something about the Nazis that’s easy to hate.

The focus in “Fury” then is not on the conundrums of war but on the necessary camaraderie among the men fighting side by side, or in this case inside the same tank.

The characters are all stock and so are their character arcs. Brad Pitt plays the tank commander, a grizzled, tough-but-tender father figure who goes by “War Daddy.” Shia Laboeuf is the religious one, nicknamed “Bible.”

There’s also a dangerously temperamental and vulgar crew member called Coon-Ass, a Mexican-American tank driver named Gordo, and finally, a greenhorn named Norman, who’s so ill-suited to tank warfare he was drafted out of the military typing pool.

As character arcs go, his is the most obvious. Norman starts out so overwhelmed, he says he’d rather be shot dead himself than have to shoot the enemy. But by movie’s end, he’s mowing down marauding Nazis as if it’s second nature. Such are the hard-earned lessons of war.

As for the plentiful battle scenes in this war movie, they’re fittingly tense, exceedingly graphic and very well-staged.

Although not the final climactic battle, the fight between the Americans’ three Sherman tanks and the single but far superior German Tiger tank is a clear highlight of the film – a fascinating glimpse into the strategy and the necessary choreography of tank warfare.

If “Fury” doesn’t have a lot of new insight into the plight of men at war, at least it doesn’t flinch at the emotional and physical costs of that warfare. Heroism may be on display here but it’s in the grimmest of circumstances. To its credit, “Fury” doesn’t take war lightly.