After a near-fatal plane crash in WWII, Olympian Louis Zamperini spends a harrowing 47 days in a raft with two fellow crewmen before he's caught by the Japanese navy and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.
Jolie's polished memorial to Zamperini's astonishing wartime valour sees O'Connell on star-making form. The uber-inspiring theme and lack of Fury-style gore should grab older kids as well as hero-hungry adults.
Unbroken is unambitious, unengaging and uninteresting – unfortunately.
Any of these episodes would make an astonishing testament to resilience. The problem is that Jolie cannot bring herself to be selective, instead cramming all of these incidents into one movie. The result is a picture that never hits its stride.
In the end, it’s good old-fashioned Boxing Day entertainment: a rollicking adventure about the indefatigability of the human spirit that falls some way short of its cinematic inspiration David Lean.
Lavish and sporadically powerful, Jolie's POW biopic may have just enough gravity to entice the Academy, but struggles to bring truth to an unbelievable truth.
For all the excellence of O’Connell’s performance, the film becomes increasingly one dimensional.
If this story is so incredible, why does it feel like we’ve seen it before?
Neither Angelina Jolie’s direction, Jack O’Connell’s good looks nor a rewrite by the Coen brothers can lift this story of an Olympic athlete sent to war in the Pacific.
It’s only when she finally turns her attention to the camp – and the battle of wills between Zamperini and a sadistic prison guard (Takamasa Ishihara) – that the movie threatens to become interesting, although even then it can’t help but resemble an inferior version of The Railway Man.
The result is a straightforward celebration of strength and courage which ends up feeling almost pat.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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