Louis Zamperini raced his way to the 1936 Olympics. During World War II, he worked as a bombardier on the B-24 Liberator “Super Man.” He went down in another plane, surviving 47 days at sea. He was eventually saved... by the Japanese Navy, who held him in a POW camp for nearly a year, until the end of the war in August 1945. Zamperini lived an extraordinary life. In the new film Unbroken, Angelina Jolie sets out to understand the naval officer's endurance. She settles for Wikipedia plotting and inspirational poster answers. Human spirit needs humanity to attach to. There's no character to be found in Unbroken.
Jolie's film is glossy and straightforward. Flirting with non-linear cross-cutting early on, hoping to find a deeper meaning to Zamperini's story, the director eventually scraps flourishes, delivering the story like a square meal. For half the film, it's enough for this impossible-to-imagine story. Jack O'Connell stars as Zamperini, a cocky, suave Italian boy from California who loves his mom's gnocchi (seriously, this comes up many times) but loves getting into trouble even more. When his brother urges him to change his life, he swaps outrunning police for high school track. Soon, he's off to Germany's Olympic games, rubbing shoulders with men he'll be at war with in a few years time.
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