One word for Unbroken: Unwatchable

Yes Louis Zamberini was an incredible athlete and an incredibly brave and honorable man and yes I am sure that Lauren Hildebrand's book about him is great as she's an excellent writer and yes I'm all for movies that tell a true story especially with an uplifting and positive moral energy and yes I admire Angelina Jolie for managing a successful transition from movie star to director but, let's face it, her Unbroken is a just about unwatchable movie: well over two hours of suffering a torture inflicted on the stoic Zamberini - an Olympic distance runner who joins up in WWII, crashes in the Pacific, suvives 47 days on a life raft only to be "rescued" by the Japanese and tortured and abused in various POW camps. What may sound like an exciting, Odysseyan epic of adventure is really monotonous, cliche-ridden mash-up of a thousand movie tropes we've see many times before: the ethnic kid ganged up on by the neighborhood bullies, the scrawny kid struggling to make the [fill int he blan] team, the come-from-behind runner who earns the medal with a near-impossible last lap, the ethnic family offering sage and pithy advice (If you can take it, you can make it) to the sound of orchestral crescendos, the mother making pasta by hand in golden light and the family gathered around the Philco mothers hands clutched together in prayer, the aerial combat (to be fair, this was probably the best sequence in the movie), the survival at sea through storms and shark attacks (a novelty here was the attack from above by a Japanese warplane), the terrible cruelty of POW camps (the Japanese were apparently just as bad to their own soldiers, see the great Human Condition), and so on. The scene I really wanted to see - Zamberini confronting his torturers years later - is not even in the movie, just int he closing supertitles. All in all, a promising project that was maybe just too promising (which may be why it sat unmade for decades) and has led to a movie that is earnest, self-consciously virtuous, over-produced (the score especially - dreadful!), and in the end a bloated bore.