Unbroken

Unbroken (15)

USA 2014  137 mins  Dir: Angelina Jolie  Starring: Jack O’Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Jai Courtney, Finn Wittrock, Takamasa Ishihara, Garrett Hedlund, Alex Russell

Angelina Jolie may or may not be a “minimally talented spoiled brat”, as producer Scott Rudin described her so sourly in one of those amusingly leaked Sony emails, but no one could accuse her of not delivering value for money. With Unbroken, she serves up three films for the price of one: an inspirational sports flick, a survival at sea endurance drama, and a brutal POW camp flick. Obviously, something so improbable can only be based on a true story. In Jolie’s hands, Louis Zamperini’s extraordinary life becomes a solid, old-fashioned awards season epic that may leave you feeling exhausted from all its worthiness and nobility.

It opens thrillingly with Zamperini (O’Connell) and his crew taking enemy fire on a B-24 bombing mission in the Pacific during WWII. Veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins and the CGI boffins deserve much of the credit for this sequence, which is as good as Unbroken gets. The film then flashes back to Zamperini’s troubled youth as a bullied Italian immigrant whose older brother dispenses fortune cookie aphorisms that inspire him to take up running. As luck would have it, he’s a natural and winds up competing for his country at the Berlin Olympics. Mercifully, Jolie chivvies the story along before it gets too Chariots of Fire and we’re back in the air with the crew of the flying WWII rustbucket, which promptly ditches into the briny. Film number two is Life of Pi without the tiger and magic realism, charting Zamperini’s 47 days adrift at sea in a raft with two fellow crew members (Gleeson, Wittrock) as they survive by snatching and scoffing passing wildlife. Surely that’s enough misery for one lifetime? Nope, an ‘out of the frying pan’ rescue finds our battered, bruised and malnourished hero being further abused in a series of grim Japanese Prisoner of War camps, his chief tormentor being camp commandant Watanabe (Japanese pop star Takamasa Ishihara), whose delicate, elfin features belie a sadistic nature.

Rising Brit star Jack O’Connell grimaces his way through it all like a champ. But in the year of ’71 and Starred Up, this must count as his second least interesting performance after 300: Rise of an Empire. Despite the input of a strong battalion of screenwriters (Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, William Nicholson), Unbroken remains obstinately glossy, well-crafted and generic. Jolie trowels on the unwelcome Christ symbolism towards the end, but when the real Louis Zamperini appears over the closing credits (he carked it, aged 97, back in July), you’re reminded that you haven’t been quite as moved as you ought to have been by his remarkably eventful life.