Unbroken: Pretty Good When It Isn’t Bordering on Interminable Torture Porn

Adapted from the Laura Hillenbrand novel based on the harrowing and inspirational tale of Louis Zamperini, director Angelina Jolie teams with the Joel Coen and Ethan Coen to deliver a film that is as harrowing for audiences as it is inspirational.

Premise: The disturbing saga of Olympian Louis Zamperini who finds himself lost at sea only to be captured by the Japanese during WWII. Result: Overall well developed but too many issues crept in and dragged this film down a notch or two.

Unbroken follows Zamperini (Jack O’Connell) in three stages of his life – tortured by Life (Growing up), tortured by Nature (lost at sea), and tortured by the Japanese (prisoner of war). The first segment finds Louis the victim of bullies and bad behavior (drinking, stealing, looking up girls’ skirts) until his brother Pete (played as a boy by John D’Leo and later as an adult by Alex Russell) essentially rescues him from himself, coaching him in life and on the track, where he excelled as a long-distance runner.

This segment is a brief, more somber Forest Gump take on running peppered by Pete’s insufferable maxims: he is essentially a catch phrase delivery device with no other impact, spouting slogans like “If you can take it, you can make it” ad nauseum. But we applaud and are excited by team Zamperini, because of our collective, secret desire to see a young kid beat odds.

Our course, if this segment allows audiences to revel in the warmth of a “feel-good” story, the remainder of the film feeds our instinctive schaudenfreude. Lost at sea for 47 days with Phil (Domhnall Gleeson) and Mac (Finn Wittrock), Jolie forces observers to relive each moment of this harrowing experience, almost moment by moment. Sharks, storms, shots from the sky, sun – all sorts of suffering fall upon our “Italian Job”, and while these scenes are certainly exhilarating, they also carry a sense of interminability that actually being lost at sea must feel like.

So creepy

But just when we can’t take anymore sloshing about in the sunbaked ocean, Mother Nature taps out to the Japanese, in the form of a detention camp led by Watanabe (Takamasa Ishihara), a creepy, sadistic monster that makes the sharks and storms seem like a warm up. Zamperini and his fellow slaves -Phil, Fitzgerald (Garrett Hedlund), Tinker (John Magaro) and so on- are tormented abominably, and Jolie keeps us there, face down in the mud and gore of it all.

Unbroken is a fair film overall, and certainly better than much of the other drivel splashing onto the screens these days. But it suffers greatly from a few too many smaller errors: it is far too long, often borders on torture porn, and deifies Zamperini, making him almost un-relatable, as some super-human creature rather than a man we could emulate – certainly a decision on her part since the book is far more humanizing.

The acting helps to distract from these creeping mistakes. O’Connell is fantastic, exhibiting a range that is impressive. Despite seeing too much of him in this film, his performance makes us want to see more of him in others.

Gleeson again is wonderful, if limited, and the same for Wittrock; Hedlund, for his part continues to be solid and a master of the single-tear. Ishihara is undeniably bizarre, as a creepy genderless monster who we can see genuinely take pleasure in his torment, feeding off the Zamperini’s pain like a starved dementor.

In the end, Unbroken is a good movie that could have been great. But an inordinate length (or at least the feel of it), excessive use of torment to make Zamperini into some sort of super human, ultimately detracts from the film, dragging it down when it should have soared.

Rating: 7- A refreshing Champagne that a cute bartender comp’d you!