If you could give a prize or credit to a film with the best intentions this holiday season, the Angelina Jolie-directed UNBROKEN would win all the love and trophies. Hell, I'm sure a lot of people (critics and otherwise) will applaud the noble effort done by Jolie and her team in bringing the unfathomable story of Olympian and World War II hero Louis Zamperini to the big screen. With a screenplay by no less than Joel and Ethan Coen (who reworked earlier drafts by Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson), based on the best-selling book of the same name by Laura Hillenbrand and lensed by the great Roger Deakins (11 nominations, still no Oscar), UNBROKEN is such a sweeping, inspiring tale that you almost feel bad picking apart its fairly massive flaws, chief among them being that everything feels manufactured and choreographed, down to the placement of dirt and blood on people's faces and clothes.
UNBROKEN opens with its strongest sequence, involving Zamperini (up-and-comer Jack O'Connell, last seen in this year's STARRED UP) and his fellow bombardiers bombing a Japanese target. The retaliatory defenses that meet them are appropriately threatening, their plane feels like it's made of spare parts held together by rubber bands, and an emergency landing made with no brakes feels, well, downright death defying. It's a tremendous scene in which we also meet other members of his team, including Phil (Domhnall Gleeson from CALVARY and FRANK) and Mac (Finn Wittrock, currently the primary source of menace on "American Horror Story: Freak Show"), who will also accompany Zamperini on a far more fateful mission.
The film jumps back and forth between Zamperini's next mission—a rescue mission of a downed plane—and his school boy days as a troubling-making Italian immigrant kid, which transitioned into him joining the track team with his brother's encouragement. Years of training and excelling led him to the Berlin Olympics (complete with Hitler and many a flying Nazi banner). The re-creation of the 1936 Olympics is quite spectacular, and it serves in sharp contrast to the rescue mission, during which the plane essentially fell apart in mid-air and crashed in the ocean with only the above three crew surviving, beginning a 47-day ordeal alone on the ocean. With almost no food and water, surrounded by sharks, and coping with a burning sun and often rough seas, these three men somehow managed to stay alive (well, two of them did) until a Japanese war boat picked them up. Again, this sequence is remarkably realized by Jolie, and after watching it, you'll need a stiff drink of water.
But once the proceedings move to the Japanese prison camp (where we are introduced to prisoner barracks commander Fitzgerald (Garrett Hedlund), the film starts to feel familiar and staged. Ultimately, UNBROKEN becomes a battle of wills between the clearly psychologically resourceful Zamperini (who makes a promise to God on the raft that he will dedicated himself to Him should he survive) and the prison camp commander Mutsushiro "The Bird" Watanabe, played by Japanese musician Miyavi (real name: Takamasa Ishihara), who struts around the camp like a sadistic peacock with a bamboo cane he uses quite liberally on poor Louie to break any lingering pride he may have about his Olympic accomplishments. And it's during these scenes that I began to lose interest. For one thing, they are exceedingly repetitive, and I struggled to see the point in showing us Zamperini whipped and beaten over and over again. We don't need additional proof that he was horribly abused; I don't think he was lying about that portion of his life.
The sad fact of UNBROKEN is that the portions of the film where Zamperini has an adversary he can see and touch (although he wouldn't dream of looking The Bird in the eye or laying a finger on him) are the least impressive or inspirational. When his enemy is a faceless one on the ground shooting up at his plane or nature itself, then you've got a bit of power and lift in the proceedings. But so much of the film takes place during Louie's captivity, it ends up feeling like a dozen other POW-type films made before. What's particularly sad is that despite the fact that the Coen Brothers penned this version of the script, you'll really have to strain to spot any trace of their clever brand of writing in the film. Watching starving men talk endlessly in detail about the food that they miss has been done to death; maybe it's true to life, but it feels like the most tired cliché.
The acting is very good, sometimes great; Deakins' cinematography is appropriate gorgeous (although I don't think this is his Oscar year—not for this); and Jolie's direction has improved vastly since her last effort, IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY. I should also mention that the subtle use of special effects is quite good as well, especially in the bombing and aerial fight sequences and the Olympics re-creation. In fact, UNBROKEN is a easily watchable affair.
The trouble is that a story like Zamperini's deserves to be better than average. There's nothing remotely triumphant about his survival. And while I certainly wouldn't encourage Jolie to pack her film full of hot air just to prop up her hero, you want to be stirred by certain moments at the end of his story (perhaps the saddest thing about the film is that Zamperini died earlier this year). The film isn't a colossal disappointment, but the potential was there for something so much more interesting and moving.
