Review of Unbroken (2014) by Tyler H — 22 Jan 2015

I'll go out and say this movie was hard to watch in both a good and bad way. While Angelina Jolie tells us this remarkable, painful story of endurance and triumph, it feels as if she left out so many things I wanted to know more about Louie Zamperini. You should expect to see a great movie from Legendary Pictures with contributions done by the legendary Coen brothers but you instead get a traditional survival movie with characters with absent character and clichéd dialogue. It is, to say the least, underwhelming.

So who is Louie Zamperini? And with that simple question comes the biggest problem of this movie. We really are not given an idea of what our protagonist is like, what kind of personality he has, and barely what motivates him to do what he does. I think a lot of people found the same problem with Superman in "Man of Steel" though I could tell our hero was conflicted, I could tell he had trouble relating with others, I was given a sufficient connection to him though he had the bare minimum of a personality. In "Unbroken", the only connection I could make with Louie was his tremendous experience WWII, as a serviceman. Speaking of "Man of Steel", this movie also has a non-chronological narrative in the first thirty minutes to give some backstory of Louie: only two instances of his life before his service. So what do we learn from these flashbacks? Well, as a kid, Louie got picked on, got in trouble, and got into track because his brother encouraged him to do so. Eventually he would attend the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany and that's it. The rest of the movie recounts his incredible ordeal during wartime.

By incredible, I do not say lightly. What this man goes through and how he pulls through is fascinating and deserves to be told. It begins when his aircraft goes down over the Pacific, leaving Louie and two other survivors stranded on two lifeboats. For 47 days, the three men are hunted by sharks, beaten down by exposure, and go to great lengths to get food. All of this could have been an entire movie by itself but our protagonist is capture by the Japanese to be held captive.

There's this really strange scene where Louie is questioned by an Imperial officer and his lines put into subtitles only to have a soldier translate everything he just said in English. What gives? Did the editor think we could not read the subtitles so he had someone else read for us? Trust is not a virtue in this flick, indeed.

The acting is nothing special. If anything, I found a lot of the actors wooden but given this film did not have empathetic script to begin with, it is excusable. Louie is played by Jack O'Connell who passes off with an okay performance. The one actor who stood out for me was Miyavi (that's his stage name) who plays a spoiled, Japanese officer known as the Bird who takes his disdain of his position out on his captives. He serves as the antagonist and combats Louie in a psychological war of endurance and suffering. Sure, the Bird's character is thinly written but interesting enough to make a good villain.

The second act centers on Louie during his time as a POW; this is where the movie becomes hard to watch. Our hero is beaten mercilessly with belts and sticks in needlessly prolonged sequences. The Bird even makes each prisoner punch poor Louie in the head. I am surprised this movie held onto a PG-13 rating You'd wonder if Mel Gibson was behind the camera at this point.

The credits were rolling and I was baffled to see the Coen brothers listed under "Written By" with two other talented writers. Just look up the work these four men have done and tell me with a straight face you are not surprised to see them write a rehashed, conventional script for this movie. It feels as if their visions collided in a death match only to have a simple underdog come out on top. At least it never got to sappy territory, it was possible though. There's this one part where the Bird forces Louie to pick up a piece of wood and all the POWs in the camp halt work to watch in silence. Yeah, aren't the Japanese soldiers supposed to be supervising their prisoners?

From all that I have told you, it sounds like I do not like this movie. No, not really. I am disappointed Jolie did not go all out and take reasonable advantage of a great story given to her on a silver platter. With that said, the story itself is worth seeing but you're going to have to deal with one-dimensional characters and brutal torture to appreciate the trials this man had to go though. "Unbroken" is broken and ends up as wasted potential.

My Rating: 4/10.