Unbro­ken

By the time Unbro­ken limps towards the fin­ish line, direc­tor Angeli­na Jolie has con­vinc­ing­ly made the case that a dozen great movies could be made about the extra­or­di­nary life of Louis ​“Louie” Zam­peri­ni. The fol­ly of this bland and broad­ly for­get­table ver­sion is that it tries to be all of them.

Based on Lau­ra Hillenbrand’s ​‘Unbro­ken: A World War II Sto­ry of Sur­vival, Resilience, and Redemp­tion’ (Kate Upton’s favourite book, FYI), Jolie’s third fea­ture is a biopic that’s paral­ysed by the awe it bears for its sub­ject, and it’s not hard to under­stand why. A scrap­py upstate New York­er born to Ital­ian immi­grants in Jan­u­ary of 1917, Zam­peri­ni was a bul­lied teenag­er who, in order to make it through his ado­les­cence in one piece, remade him­self as a light­weight box­er. But that wasn’t meant to be — Zam­peri­ni soon learned that not fight­ing is bet­ter than los­ing, and remade him­self once more as a run­ner. Short­ly after grad­u­at­ing high school, he became the youngest Amer­i­can to ever qual­i­fy for the 5,000-meter race at the Olympics.

In 1941, Zam­peri­ni enlist­ed in the Air Force, and in 1943, the plane on which he was serv­ing as a sec­ond lieu­tenant crashed into the Pacif­ic Ocean 850 miles south of Oahu. Zam­peri­ni was one of three men to sur­vive the event, and one of two to make it through the 47 days of being strand­ed at sea that fol­lowed. ​“Res­cued” by a Japan­ese naval unit, the two Amer­i­cans were then detained in a vari­ety of POW camps, where they did not have fun. Zam­peri­ni wouldn’t only sur­vive the war, he would live long enough to be reward­ed with a sec­ond inter­view slot on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (so don’t accuse Amer­i­ca of not prop­er­ly hon­our­ing its heroes).

Zamperini’s sto­ry is too incred­i­ble to be fic­tion, but its telling smacks of arti­fice. The kind of film in which the events described by the clos­ing title cards are far more inter­est­ing than any­thing in the film itself, Unbro­ken begins by under­lin­ing the pro­fun­di­ty of Zamperini’s jour­ney, only to slow­ly reduce the man to the val­ues he embod­ies over the course of an increas­ing­ly dull would-be epic. The script (bur­nished by the Coen broth­ers) doesn’t give him much to work with, but ris­ing star Jack O’Connell (Starred Up, ​’71) is well cast as the under­sized hero, imbu­ing Zam­peri­ni with a mix of fiery deter­mi­na­tion and blue-col­lar vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty that works in all of the character’s var­i­ous states of duress. Both the actor and the film are at their best dur­ing the ear­ly going, in which Zam­peri­ni and his band of broth­ers try to stay aloft in the fly­ing scrapheaps they’re forced to fly. It’s these sequences, which main­tain a nat­u­ral­is­tic tone despite dab­bles of glar­ing­ly fake CG, in which Jolie makes her most com­pelling case as a film­mak­er — if lit­tle else, she pos­sess­es a For­dian flair for emo­tion­al­ly moti­vat­ed action.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Jolie’s strengths (which make her seem a bet­ter fit for a mid-bud­get sus­pense thriller than they do a bleed­ing hunk of Oscar chum) were under­mined by her weak­ness­es by the time she first arrived on set. It’s not her com­pe­ten­cy that’s the prob­lem, it’s her instincts. Jolie sub­mits to con­ven­tion by paus­ing Zamperini’s mil­i­tary adven­tures in order to flash­back to his for­ma­tive years as a bur­geon­ing track star, but fails to accom­plish any­thing with these scenes beyond under­lin­ing the runner’s fame. Obvi­ous­ly the same under­dog resilience that made Zam­peri­ni an unlike­ly Olympic con­tender resur­faces dur­ing his wartime ordeal, but the film reveres his can-do excep­tion­al­ism like it’s a birthright, like he’s sim­ply bet­ter than his less for­tu­nate comrades.

The sadis­tic Japan­ese tor­tur­er who toys with Zam­peri­ni cer­tain­ly feels the same way. Mut­suhi­ro ​“The Bird” Watan­abe (played by pop star Miyavi) ruth­less­ly antag­o­nis­es his prized Amer­i­can charge, but the char­ac­ter is more defined by his youth­ful­ness than his vio­lence. A shal­low char­ac­ter, quick­ly for­got­ten as soon as Jolie’s cam­era diverts its atten­tion from him, The Bird’s boy­ish­ness nev­er­the­less reflects just how young all of these men are, the struc­ture of the film around them mis­tak­en­ly insist­ing that their for­ma­tive years are behind them (what­ev­er issues Jolie might have with her instincts, she con­tin­ues to show a keen eye for her select­ing her cast and collaborators).

A missed oppor­tu­ni­ty for a more nuanced win­dow to the war, the char­ac­ters’ ages, along with their inabil­i­ty to make mean­ing­ful choic­es, makes Unbro­ken feel like a YA adap­ta­tion of a more adult sto­ry, the Hunger Games to Mer­ry Christ­mas Mr Lawrence’s Bat­tle Royale. Ulti­mate­ly, Miyavi’s per­for­mance can do lit­tle to save the scenes at the var­i­ous POW camps from blend­ing togeth­er into an expe­ri­ence as point­less and pro­tract­ed as war, itself. Every­thing about Unbro­ken (includ­ing Alexan­dre Desplat’s score, stir­ring but out of place) is tilt­ed towards mak­ing Zamperini’s life feel like the incred­i­ble jour­ney that it was, but in reduc­ing such an unfath­omable sto­ry into a basic nar­ra­tive of tri­umph, Jolie’s film ulti­mate­ly makes it feel… ordinary.