In this case, “piracy is . . . a victimless crime” but proves not worth the effort, anyway. Fury (2014) clones and creeps its petty pace for two-and-a-half hours full of much sound, visual war effects as wrenching as those of the beachhead in otherwise overpraised Saving Private Ryan, and corn hackneyed story, script and characters.

The conflict nearing its inevitable conclusion as the American-only Allies slash and burn through remnants of the Reich, in printed titles Der Fúhrer demands “total war.” Work, however, remains for writer/director/co-producer David Ayer’s cardboard soldiers. Co-executive producer Brad Pitt’s weary, no-nonsense Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier needs to daddy his tank crew once more into the breach against Nazis and Panzers with backs pressed to the wall now on their own sacred Vaterland soil.

“FURY” hand painted on its cannon, his five-man Sherman is one short, the guts of the late fifth stinking up its cramped airless insides. “Wardaddy” cajoles, cossets, bullies and protects his men but is not a patch on John Wayne’s Marine Sergeant John Stryker -- “an older man molding young men” -- or Bogart’s cunningly named Sergeant Joe Gunn in his M-1 tank Lulubelle. He is lonely, even aloof, though able to josh around with the fellas when need be. He can be severe and ruthless, cold-bloodedly killing sniveling Nazis who would otherwise have shot them, and toughening for his own good and that of all of them, newly assigned Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), tritely sensitive, clean, clean-shaved, and a book-reader to boot.

The three others left alive come out of many another, and many a better, war movie, even though there is no William Bendix Brooklynite among them and the frequent Italian is PC’d into Hispanic Trini “Gordo” García (Michael Peña). Mustached gunner Boyd Swann (Shia LeBeouf) is “Bible,” quoting from the Good Book and oozing Christian calm, while Jon Bernthal’s Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis is a top mechanic -- though even he cannot in short order repair a rocketed continuous track -- but an edgy loose cannon pushing others to the limit.

It is 1945, but Hollywood makes its anachronistic demographics-bait mistake of salting the product with a barrage of four-letter dialogue quite out of place for that time. Then, too, along with García there is the brief single black soldier in our then strictly segregated Armed Forces.

Norman hardens somewhat, but after “Wardaddy” shampoos and shaves Travis nasties up an idyll with two doomed Frauleins (Anamaria Marinca, Alicia von Rittberg). Nevertheless, why are we not surprised that all the five men bond and have one another’s backs? Conquering or flattening any one town is not the end, for another lies just down the muddy road. And then another, and another . . . Sooner or later, the odds, the bullet or shell with names on it catches up, leading to one of the oldest of American fables, film or otherwise: a couple cowpokes hold off the entire Sioux nation or a tank crew does so against several hundred heavily armed German troops out to “skin you alive.”

Unexceptional in repeating what has already been done often and often better, Fury is salvaged by some of the visually most intense narrative combat footage ever. Pyrotechnic white-ish, red, blue-green bullet and shell tracer trails; and seldom reenacted but realistic instantaneous decapitations and amputations; our (not only their) shooting surrendering adversaries; bodies piled onto vehicles or on the ground and mashed into it by mechanized weaponry. It is unpleasant to watch but undoubtedly, unfortunately true.

(Released by Columbia Pictures and rated “R” for strong sequences of violence, some grisly images and language throughout.)