Review: Unbroken

City Paper grade: B-

Changeling isn’t one of Clint Eastwood’s better movies, but Angelina Jolie must have taken some dynamite notes during filming. Her second film as a director, which tells the story of Olympic runner and later Japanese POW Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), is a better Eastwood movie (or at least a less politically repugnant one) than Clint’s own American Sniper. O’Connell, though seen to better effect in this year’s Starred Up and next year’s ’71, gives Zamperini’s immigrant tenacity his best shot, and it’s a good one; for once, here’s a young male movie star in a sudden spurt of movies that doesn’t seem like he’s been foisted on for no good reason. But Jolie’s even-tempered stateliness, which feels pleasantly distinct in the opening dogfight scene, grows monotonous over the long haul, especially over the distended sequence when Zamperini and two fellow airmen are lost at sea. Matters get worse still when Zamperini lands in a Japanese POW camp, where he’s menaced by Takamasa Ishihara’s cartoonishly tyrannical commander. (Based on historical accounts, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, known as “The Bird,” really was that bad, but life doesn’t always make satisfying fiction.) The climax, in which Zamperini bests his adversary through sheer force of will, is such generically inspirational bunkum you expect the scene to end with O’Connell jogging up the steps to retrieve his Oscar. The end credits reveal that after the war, Zamperini returned to Japan and made peace with his torturers (or all but one): It’s a bad sign when the text over a movie’s closing credits suggests a story far more fascinating than the one it’s just finished telling.