A nickname I’m giving Angelina Jolie’s new torture-palooza “Unbroken” is The Passion of the Soldier because it is mostly about watching a young soldier get the snot knocked out of him and/or struggling to survive in various ways. Now we know from the outset that the real-life guy this story is based on (Louie Zamperini) lives, and so the film technically has a happy ending, but that part is brief and obviously not what’s really driving Jolie. We learn very little about Zamperini’s post-WWII life, and even though the post-script tells us something about how he learned to forgive instead of avenge and met with most of his captors to forgive them, well, all that sounds inspirational, but we see none of it. It comes across as slapping an uplifting message on an obsessively down movie.
What Works: Jack O’Connell is a real find as Zamperini—and I’m speaking as someone who doesn’t know him from Skins and hasn’t yet gotten to watch the supposedly excellent “Starred Up” he head-lined earlier in the year—and that’s a good thing, but he’s asked to do a lot with not much. I hate to sound disrespectful to the real-life Zamperini, but the on screen version of him is actually under-written, and long stretches of the movie contain him speaking very little as he’s forced to wordlessly endure pain. [“Pain” is a word that will come up several times in this review, so I apologize in advance for repetitive language, but few other words would do this film’s driving emotion justice.] And Japanese pop star Miyavi is scathingly intense as the resentful POW camp officer that takes special delight in trying to “break” an Olympic athlete who has gotten the respect that’s always alluded him. Naturally, he singles out our hero for cruelty…
What Doesn’t: …but there’s little else to their twisted dynamic than just a torturer/torturee relationship. In fact, there’s little else to the film than watching O’Connell s-u-f-f-e-r. Whether he’s pushing himself to painful heights in the Olympics or trying not to starve to death in a life raft for 45 days (that’s right, 45 days) or the unable-to-be-listed abuses that await him at that POW camp, the film’s message seems to be less “Inspiring Christmas Day story!” than “Made to Suffer.”
The film’s trailer materials are very misleading since it looks like a triumph of the human spirit movie, but to be honest, it’s really not that. The obligatory “happy ending” is so rushed that it actually feels tacked-on (if it equals 5 full minutes, it would surprise me). Between this and her directorial debut—the even more depressing “In the Land of Blood and Honey” that detailed a psycho-sexual “relationship” between a captive and an enemy officer—it’s not unfair to call Jolie a pain-freak as a director, and she has an almost clinical fascination for (but weird detachment from) the pain her characters can endure. This film disguises that a little bit better beneath a thin facade of WWII nostalgia and “Oscar Prestige” but it’s still there.
What I Would Have Done Differently: One day, Mel Gibson and Angelina Jolie will swap notes on torture, and getting to be a fly on the wall during that conversation will be the most interesting time we’ve had with either of them in years.