Unbroken movie review

Article by Gabe Zia

Lazy Film Critic reviews....

Unbroken is a biopic about essentially the life of this guy named Louis Zamperini, which goes from being about him being an olympic runner, to him being a WWII pilot, to surviving on the ocean for 47 days Life of Pi style, to finally being stuck in a Japanese POW camp until the end of the war. Gotta admit, that's a lot to take in all at once. The film stars Jack O'Connell as Louis, as well as Miyavi, Domhnall Gleeson, Jai Courtney, Finn Witrock, Luke Treadway, John Magaro,  and Alex Russel.

The cast of this film - for the most part - does a pretty good job. Domhnall Gleeson, Garrett Hedlund, and Finn Witrock are all pretty good as supporting roles, and are fairly memorable for their characters. Jack O'Connell, I gotta say, does a pretty good job in the role. There are a few scenes in which he's better than others, particularly the later scenes in both the Ocean survival plotline and the POW camp plotline.  However, the standout performance comes from this pop singer named Miyavi, who plays one of the most evil jerks I've seen in a long time. Not that the guards for POW camps in WWII were anything like the guards in The Green Mile or something, but this guy was a supreme jerk. For him to go from being a pop star with (I'm guessing) not a lot of acting experience, to playing a scary vicious POW guard, that's impressive.

While the acting is all around pretty on-point, the dialogue kind of falls flat a lot of the time. Some of the time it's good, say whenever two characters are generally talking, or are having fairly short scenes of dialogue, it's good, and it works. However, it's when the characters have to get serious, and talk about anything specific to the main characters, the film gets really corny, or cheesy. That's not exactly the best word to use to describe it, but for a lack of any other words to think of to use, cheesy or corny are close enough.

One thing I'll say for this movie is that it's dark. Despite the dialogue getting a little corny at times, the stuff that's actually happening is pretty horrible. For the ocean scenes, this is nothing like Life of Pi. Where Lift of Pi was existential, and had a lot of visual flare, these scenes are purely survival, and not a lot of fun to watch. The same goes for the POW camp scenes, where it's pretty much nothing but beatings and forced labour right up until the end. However, these two really dark stories is where the movie kind of breaks itself down. It's one thing to make either a POW camp set film, or a survival film. But both genres put into one movie leads to overcrowding, which leads to a lot of the supporting characters not getting that much screentime.

Final Rating
As far as biograpical movies go, Unbroken isn't bad. It's got good acting, as well as a dark and bold storyline, and some decent dialogue. However, it's also brought down by some cheesy dialogue, overcrowded plots, and a lack of some characters getting the screentime they deserve. As for my recommendation, I'd say it's really up to you. If you want a good biographical movie to watch with some cool stuff going on almost throughout, I'd see check it out.

Unbroken: 3.3/5