Uneven directorial effort from Angelina Jolie
Being an A-list movie star, Angelina Jolie is offered the best film projects, and the critical and commercial success of her most recent starrer, “Maleficent,” is proof positive of her gift for making the right film choices. However, when it comes to her incipient directing career, her vision isn’t 20-20, as her new directorial effort, “Unbroken,” has indicated.
On point of inspirational power, the project is top-of-the-line, because it shows how a young sports hero and soldier is able to survive years of cruel treatment in a Japanese concentration camp with his heart and soul intact.
The film’s protagonist, Louis Zamperini, overcomes a rebellious and lawbreaking childhood to become an Olympian runner—and the true grit he has gained from his training as a champion athlete enables him to first survive a plane crash and weeks adrift in the ocean, before he ends up in the concentration camp.
JOLIE. Her heart is in the right place.
Being a prisoner of war is tough enough, but Zamperini’s lot turns out to be even more daunting, because the camp’s commander is a psycho who makes it his personal objective to “break” the sports hero who is now his prisoner.
He never runs out of terrible punishments to inflict on his hapless victim of choice, including his order for Zamperini to be punched by each of the camp’s prisoners!
Heavy beam
Worst of all, he makes Zamperini lift a heavy wooden beam for a very long time—until his victim shows him who’s really in charge—by not just bearing his load, but even triumphantly lifting it over his head!
That truly inspiring and literally uplifting image is cause for cinematic celebration—but, the film as a whole is hampered by its uneven and episodic structure:
The first third of the film focuses on its hero’s back story as a child and young man; the second on his ordeal as a crash survivor, and the final third on his long incarceration.
Jolie isn’t able to fuse those three sections together into a thematically organic whole, so her film’s development feels occasionally choppy and episodic.
The storytelling’s “flow” of events is less than insightful, so by the time we get to the concentration camp, we’re a bit weary, and some of the incidents that are dramatized feel repetitive.
In addition, this final section requires Jolie to keep track of many other prisoners, resulting in a loss of focus on the film’s principal protagonist.
A more experienced and insightful director would have done better at this “multifocus” assignment, so perhaps Jolie chose too big a chunk of cinema to bite into at this early stage of her directorial career?
Still, her heart and talent are in the right place, so we trust that her next film will turn out to be a more focused, better-paced and more confident cinematic achievement!
