Unbroken

Angelina Jolie surprises with her old-fashioned, consistent direction and a very conscious tone that permeates the entire film. There aren't many highlights, but the standard is maintained throughout. Unfortunately, the pacing (the drive) fails dramatically and doesn't hold consistency. Given the fantastic opening ten minutes, which suitably lure you in, there is a sense of stagnation throughout the rest of this adventure story, which has the basic plot premise of The Shawshank Redemption, but a bit lower in quality. Essentially without sentimentality – thumbs up for that. The women in Hollywood have been balling it up proficiently recently (Bigelow, Jolie). The acting is fine, and Roger Deakins is a safe bet. (07/16/2016)

I had no particular expectations from this movie. But I must just say that however high I might have set the limits of expectation, Unbroken would surely have broken them. This movie was so superb to watch that it ripped me to bits inside. You can see the excellent results of all the hard work that went into this. Acting performances of great bravado, the scenery and the production blended together with each other perfectly. The storyline got me by the heart strings and I will be processing the emotions that the movie left inside me for a long time hence. The wonderful steady rise in tension throughout the movie is reflected in the score I give this, which is a full set of 5*. (05/11/2015)

It is visible that Angelina learned from masters, but it didn't help her much in just shooting something that is terribly typical for Americans. It is a strong story, but personally, I think I would prefer it in a book format. There are big scenes, there are wonderfully harsh scenes, but overall it is just an effort to show how some Americans had a difficult time. Louis's story is captivating and cruelly beautiful, but in this film adaptation, it didn't touch me as much. (02/01/2015)

Angelina Jolie managed to show up even Clint Eastwood with this film, without the pathos I expected, but with a powerful story and the excellent Jack O'Connell in the leading role. She didn’t achieve this by being original, but by employing an accurate, clean, old-school Hollywood narrative like those done by Edward Zwick or Ron Howard. With a nod to Forrest Gump, the film completely overshadows prison stories like Hart's War and paraphrases the idea of The Shawshank Redemption. Of course, it is questionable if she could have completed such an ambitious project without the Coen brothers as screenwriters and Roger Deakins as the cinematographer. But let’s not be mean. It’s still not bad for the former Lara Croft. (02/16/2015)

A film that aroused in me only the essential laziness and the feeling that if I ever wanted to see the American version of Story of a Real Man (with a different scale of values and emphasis on individual physical endurance), I would have to watch Unbroken. At its core, a tolerable chain of hard-working and quite skillfully realized scenes, in which de facto order does not matter, neither does causality (perhaps one does not care why Hedlund suddenly cries in an inserted scene), and psychology not at all. Clumsily embedded flashbacks are based on proclamations that could be heard in any Pixar film, and the subsequent dialogues seem as they came from a random generator of catchphrases from war films. The Coen Brothers kind of write it as material for beginners - we teach about filming heroes. 90 minutes of suffering is more and more reminiscent of soft exploitation (can we sympathize with a character who is just a carrier for rags and makeup?), at the end ambitiously crowned with an quest for a kind of Christian myth… or what does episode with the beam actually mean? Who bloody cares? Angelina is instructed, as a protective child she has an elite crew on hand, so Unbroken moves and looks nice (sometimes incongruously nicely and aesthetically thanks to Deakins' camera). It's a bit of a dinosaur tribute to an old school war film without the ability to understand and bring forth anything essential. War screensaver. Matty's comparison with McQueen is entirely appropriate. In fact, I could just symbolically sign my name under his review. [50%] (02/04/2015)