Unbroken: Path to Redemption Review

I'm guessing the casual viewer, when seeing news of an "Unbroken" sequel, may have been perplexed at its existence, especially since this is coming from a completely different production company than the people who made the first movie. It's a low budget team of Christian movie makers instead of a major Hollywood studio. That's why it made only $2.2 million this past weekend as opposed to the first "Unbroken," which made $30.6 million opening weekend, ending with $115.6 million total domestically. This prediction of how the casual viewer might look at this sequel accurately reflected it's critical score on Rotten Tomatoes as it currently stands at just 26 percent with just 19 reviews counted, with most of the negative reviews calling it boring and unnecessary, with nothing interesting to add to the first movie. I'm not surprised at that. Most critics are super critical of faith-based movies. A lot of my favorite faith-based movies have a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes. In this case, the 86 percent score that "Path to Redemption" has on the audience section of Rotten Tomatoes might be more telling, as is the A grade it got on Cinemascore. People who were actually interested in this movie seem to have been mostly pleased with the outcome.

As far as my personal experience, I was one of the people who was rather upset with the first film. Yeah, sure, if you go in completely blind to the story of Louis Zamperini, you might have found the story rather uplifting and rewarding. Angelina Jolie directed the movie and she showed decent competency in her ability to make a film. It was well shot and well acted. It did a pretty good job at telling the first two-thirds of Zamperini's story. But therein lies the problem. In typical mainstream Hollywood fashion, the filmmakers took a very religious story and removed the religion from it, instead choosing to focus on the horrors of war and war-related action sequences. And even then, they sanitized the story quite a bit in order to get their family-friendly PG-13 rating, which in this instance didn't do Zamperini's experiences justice. What happened to him was a lot more brutal than what the movie chose to display. But even putting that aside, this specific story was a whole lot more than just a guy who became a prisoner of war in Japan. It's a story about a guy whose experiences in war completely destroyed him and nearly ruined his life, yet the movie summarized things by simply stating in the credits that he lived up to his promise to follow God.

I was shocked and stunned when I saw that in theaters. They took the heart and soul of the story and summarized it in the end credits with a line that doesn't even do justice to the term over-simplification. Zamperini got home from war, got married, and was doing alright, but his PTSD continued to get worse and worse as time went on. He became a drunken mess, he couldn't find a job that he was satisfied with taking, and his wife was extremely close to divorcing him because she couldn't handle it anymore. He even completely forgot about his promise that he made to God when he was on that raft one night, wherein he promised that if God saved him, he would spend the rest of his life serving him. This is an element of war that I don't think Hollywood spends enough time on. They focus so much on the war itself and what the soldiers went through during the war, but often completely ignore the post-war trauma that many soldiers went through when they got home. That's why I loved the book "Unbroken," by Laura Hillenbrand, because not only did it tell the story of what Louis went through during the war, but it also told the story of what he went through after war and how he was able to miraculously overcome it.

And that's where we get to this movie. After seeing "Unbroken" in theaters, I thought that was the end of things as far as movies based on Zamperini's life. But then I saw this trailer. A movie based on what happened next. Apparently I wasn't the only one who felt cheated after watching Angelina Jolie's movie. I was rather elated to see that a Christian studio set out to do Zamperini's story justice because the story of what happened to him when he got home was the best part of the story. So while the rest of the world was checking out Shane Black's latest addition the Predator franchise, simply titled "The Predator," a super creative title might I add, I went out to see "Path to Redemption." I considered that a pretty good decision. "The Predator" was getting panned, anyways. And I have never seen any of the Predator movies, so why would I be a good judge of that? But given how passionate I was about the book "Unbroken," and how disappointed I was about the first movie, I needed to see this movie. And the world needed my review because none of these other critics were going to give it a fair look. Except for maybe Josh Terry of the Deseret News. And yeah, he gave it a good review, so you can take that into account. He's someone I generally trust.

 All of that said, my level of excitement for this movie was officially set at cautiously optimistic. I loved the idea that this follow-up was happening. I didn't love the specific studio that it was coming from. Pure Flix. They have a very rocky record when it comes to Christian films. Yeah, "Woodlawn" was alright and I hear "The Case for Christ" was surprisingly good, but they also did "God's Not Dead 2" as well as "God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness," the latter of which was so poorly received by all parties earlier this year that it didn't even expand far enough for me to see it. So yeah, Pure Flix is very well known for distributing the very preachy, Protestant films that make you feel like you walked into a Sunday sermon instead of a movie theater. Sometimes they work good enough, but more often than not they usually are severely lacking in cinematic quality, forgetting about things such as acting, directing and proper storytelling. Unfortunately that's exactly where "Path to Redemption" falters. It's not a very high quality film. For everything that "Unbroken" does wrong, I will give credit where credit is due and Angelina Jolie did a better directed job than Harold Cronk did in "Path to Redemption" and Jack O'Connell was a much better Zamperini than Samuel Hunt.

"Path to Redemption" completely skips over all the war sequences, choosing to tell that whole story in newspaper clippings at the very beginning of the movie. A big part of this is that they wanted to focus on the final section of the movie. But I think another reason is that they no desire to make a war film because I'm guessing this team didn't know how and also didn't have close to the proper budget to make it work. Director Harold Cronk, who directed the first two "God's Not Dead" films, doesn't ever seem to know what to do with his actors in any of his films, so I'm guessing that they're mostly always on their own when it comes to the script, which is probably why the acting is all over the place. Samuel Hunt does his best job with what he's given, but he doesn't have the appearance of someone who has just been traumatized from war. He'll be your perfectly normal average Joe one moment, then yelling at people and throwing things across the room the next. Instead of feeling like he's a broken man, it feels very jarring and out of place. Jack O'Connell could've done an amazing job at post-war Zamperini, but he was never given the opportunity. And bless her heart, but Merritt Patterson has no chemistry with Hunt as Zamperini's wife.

I think another major problem with this movie was that I believe it would've been extremely effective as the final 30 minutes of the first "Unbroken" rather than being a 90-minute movie on its own. I'll hold my ground that this portion of the book is what makes the story interesting, but it's the final third of the book as opposed to being a second book on its own. There's not enough content to fill an entire movie and make it perfectly engaging, especially when you don't have a very competent team of writers to begin with. The moments where Zamperini is having nightmares about the war or seeing hallucinations of the main Japanese guy who tortured him are extremely effective. There's a scene with him at a restaurant where the server gives him rice, but he flips out because his memories with rice consistent of it being full of bugs and worms, thus making that scene effective. But in between moments like this, there's a lot of moments with everyone living life in a very normal way and those moments weren't very engaging. They spent a long time on the love story between him and his wife and that love story wasn't very interesting, which in turn made the sequences at the end with their marriage falling apart less emotionally impactful given that I wasn't as invested.

That said, I walked out of this film having been much less offended at the final result than the first movie. Yes, Angelina Jolie made a better film on a technical scale than Harold Cronk did in this sequel. But whereas Jolie and company ripped the heart and soul out of Zamerini's story, Cronk and company actually had good intentions and stayed true to the full story. It's a lower quality film, but it's a more accurate film that does a better job at doing justice to the story and to the book that I have come to love. In a perfect world, perhaps we could combine the two films into one proper "Unbroken" film that tells the whole story of Zamperini as told in Hillenbrand's and does so with proper cinematic qualities, as in good acting, good directing, good cinematography and good storytelling abilities. And maybe the perfect person for that would be Mel Gibson, who has proven to be great with his war films in accurately capturing the horrors of war, but also being able to do justice to the religious side of things, like he did with "Hacksaw Ridge." Given that he also directed "The Passion of the Christ," I think he'd be the perfect director to make a proper "Unbroken" film. But alas, we'll just have to live with what we have. My grade for "Unbroken: Path to Redemption" is a 7/10.