UNBROKEN

3.5 stars (out of 5)

The true story of Louis Zamperini (1917 – 2014) was a possible film project for decades and linked to everyone from Tony Curtis to Nicolas Cage, and finally it found a director (and producer) willing to push particularly hard to get it made: one Angelina Jolie. It’s not her feature début (as some seem to think), and it does feel slightly familiar into the second half, at times, after The Railway Man, and yet this is nevertheless a powerful and memorable study of another wartime hero who struggled to survive – and struggled to forgive.

As a kid (played by CJ Valleroy), the LA-residing Zamperini was bullied due to his Italian heritage and always in trouble with the police, and Jolie and a script co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen and others link his continual escapes from gangs and cops to his eventual calling as a runner. Competing on the track during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Louis (by this point played by English actor Jack O’Connell) was later in a military plane during World War 2 that was shot down over the Pacific Ocean, and somehow survived adrift for 47 days (!!!) before being ‘rescued’ by the Japanese navy. This then began some two years’ worth of starvation and personal abuse from Watanabe (Takamasa Ishihara, who found filming some of his more intense sequences too much to bear), as proceedings do occasionally recall The Railway Man, no matter how dreadful the tortures or how beaten and emaciated O’Connell looks.

Neglecting to point out that Zamperini learned to forgive after being ‘born again’ (whereas The Railway Man’s Eric Lomax moved on mostly as it was either that or madness), Jolie’s handsome and wholly Australia-shot production features fine playing, especially from Domhnall Gleeson (as Zamperini’s comrade Phil), Jai Courtney (as the ill-fated Cup) and O’Connell in a star-making performance. There are rather too many CG effects in the opening flying scenes and later with the sharks (which aren’t that frightening as they obviously aren’t real), but that’s the only serious flaw here, although some will inevitably dismiss or even detest this simply as Jolie directed it. And they can all take a running jump.