Unbroken

An interminable, redundant, unnecessary epic devoted to suffering, suffering, suffering. The great young Irish actor Jack O’Connell stars as the American Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, who survives forty-seven days in the Pacific, on a raft, after his B-24 ditches, in 1942. Zamperini then spends three years in Japanese prison camps, where he is beaten again and again, and endures one grotesque punishment in which the entire population of prisoners, one after another, must punch him in the face. You feel like yelling “Cut!” to the director, Angelina Jolie, who confuses long scenes of sadism with truth-telling. O’Connell’s tormenter is a repressed homosexual (Miyavi, the smooth-faced Japanese pop star) who loves Zamperini and can’t stop attacking him—a tired trope from the Freudian Hollywood of the forties. In large set pieces, Jolie is more than competent, but the movie feels derivative and short of ideas other than the notion that endurance makes a man great. With Domhnall Gleeson and Garrett Hedlund, as fellow-prisoners. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, and William Nicholson worked on the script, based on Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 best-seller. Roger Deakins did the impressive cinematography. Shot in Australia. (In wide release.)