Post by StevePulaski on May 9, 2019 10:40:23 GMT -5
Unbroken: Path to Redemption (2018)
Directed by: Harold Cronk
Directed by: Harold Cronk
Samuel Hunt.
Rating: ★★½
Unbroken: Path to Redemption is a unique case for the ordinarily pellucid Pure Flix studio, as it's billed as a spiritual sequel to Angelina Jolie's modestly successful Unbroken from 2014. Unseen by me, the film chronicled resilient war hero Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who spent 47 days lost at sea following an aerial attack during World War II. He washed ashore on the Japanese-occupied Marshall Islands, where he was captured and tortured for two years until the war was over. Jolie's film apparently covered his perilous days in the shark-invested Pacific along with his time in captivity, but mostly wrote off his post-war struggles as part of its story's epilogue. This is where director Harold Cronk (God's Not Dead) and writers Richard Friedenberg (A River Runs Through It) and Ken Hixon come in, as they've expanded upon Zamperini's return to America and struggles to make peace with his time away from all normalcy.
While a sequel in name only, as the only commonality with Jolie's film is a shared producer credit thanks to the generosity of Matthew Baer, plus the source material of Laura Hillenbrand's novel, Unbroken: Path to Redemption isn't a project I'd call needless. In fact, I'd go a step further and say Zamperini's journey of overcoming PTSD and alcoholism and finding forgiveness is in large part where his story began. However, it's not the kind of story Hollywood is comfortable peddling. Cronk and Pure Flix try so hard to make a gritty, realistic drama out of this oversight, yet can't seem to get out of their own way. The low-budget effort comes across as eye-rolling bathos after a 70 minute depiction of Zamperini's struggles is turned around with a five minute scene that shows him stumbling into Billy Graham's 1949 Los Angeles Crusade and suddenly changing his ways. To reiterate, this isn't a useless movie, but an entirely lukewarm one, content to provide easy answers to problems entirely too complex to shortchange with a revelatory scene in the third act.
Replacing British actor Jack O'Connell as Zamperini is Samuel Hunt, an actor you probably wouldn't recognize if he were sitting next to you at the local gin-mill. Following his return home, Zamperini goes on a makeshift tour to use his story of survival to motivate patriots, not to mention solicit war-bonds. At first, Zamperini copes with his bouts of nightmarish hallucinations by way of light drinking and walking it off, as the old war-time cliche goes.
He takes a break and goes on holiday with his buddy and finds the charismatic and radiant Cynthia (Merritt Patterson), whom he marries in a matter of days, just like old times. But as the two forge a microcosm of domesticity together, having a child and buying a home, Zamperini becomes more unstable and his drinking intensifies. Like a good drunk, he hides his whiskey pints in toilet tanks and deep in the crannies of his cabinets, but Cynthia is too wise to have the wool pulled over her head for too long. A god-fearing Christian, Cynthia pleads for her husband to go to church, but he'll have none of it. "God is my enemy," he chillingly tells her, and proceeds to slog away at the bar, living off of a $10,000 severance check his parents received when it looked like all hope was lost for their son to return alive. "I died for this money," he too tells Cynthia when scraping up the last of it to use for some shoddy truck-selling business with another town boozehound.
Like several Pure Flix products, or Cronk films, for that matter, Unbroken: Path to Redemption alludes to the idea that Zamperini's troubles are brought on by his lack of faith. When he waltzes into Billy Graham's flea-market-like tent in Los Angeles on that fateful day in 1949, everything changes, and evil thoughts of getting revenge on the Japanese army corporal melt away in favor of the gospel of forgiveness and loving thy neighbor. Because this is a true story, I can't really critique the logic of forgiving your oppressor/kidnapper very well, can I? I'll say this with the utmost sincerity: Louis Zamperini was a stronger man than I could ever hope to be. He already proved that by running faster than I can drive.
Maybe it's the source material of Laura Hillenbrand's novel, or the gravitas that the Zamperini name and its ongoing "Victory Boys Camp" foundation still have to this day, but Cronk and company are grounded in earnest intentions so much so that the "call to action" so many of these Christian films feel the need to present is absent here. I can honestly believe the intent was to write and direct an honest account of what ultimately led to Zamperini's legacy as a human-being long after he returned home from captivity. While Hunt's performance is adequate, often outshined by Patterson, there is a stifling blandness to the film's cinematography, indicative of a budget ill-equipped to handsomely paint the period setting a project like this often demands. Most captivating is seeing Zamperini's downward spiral. From the look and movement of the early scenes, I feared that this would be a rather pretty portrayal of addiction and violent rage (and in some ways it is). But the fact that Friedenberg and Hixon commit so much screentime to scenes of this nature show they weren't willing to erase the ugliness of the young man's return to American soil.
But I can't shake the cutesy wrap-up of it all. Unbroken: Path to Redemption took an acceptable narrative direction for much of its runtime, but to distill Zamperini's turning point to a brief sequence under the tent of Graham and following it with him pouring all his concealed pints down the drain is, to me, disingenuous and frankly unnervingly simple. Loathe Clint Eastwood's American Sniper all you want, but even it didn't offer as convenient of an out as this film does. As the great Charles Bukowski said, if you're going to do something, go all the way, otherwise don't even start. The odds were stacked against you when you tried to make a sequel to a Hollywood movie under the umbrella of a fringe studio, but to dilute the resurgence of a man who was once lost, on a road to nowhere, undermines the unwritten thesis of Pure Flix's very existence.
Starring: Samuel Hunt, Merritt Patterson, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Bobby Campo, and David DeLuise. Directed by: Harold Cronk.