As awards season continues heating up, even as the weather outside gets colder, eyes are turning toward Angelina Jolie's Unbroken to be a major player, set to hit cinemas on Christmas Day. One of the few award movies left this year whose quality has been kept under wraps, many were predicting this would be the movie to take the Best Picture Oscar this year, despite the lack of word of mouth from those who have actually seen the movie.
Now the embargo is gone, and the first reviews are out. With that, the consensus seems to conclude the following: while there are a lot of things to like about the film, Unbroken may not be the awards-favorite people are prematurely making it out to be.
Various reviews, collected by Slashfilm, single out the movie's cinematography, from Roger Deakins, its score from Alexandre Desplat and the lead performance from Jack O'Connell. But many criticize Jolie's approach to Louis Zamperini's life story, believing it is too conventional and safe to fully communicate the gravity of the former Olympian-turned-war prisoner Louis Zamperini's story.
Among the positive, but not over-the-moon in love, reviews are from The Wrap, The Hollywood Reporter and Indiewire. The Wrap notes how Unbroken "boasts both sheen and efficiency without always delivering an equivalent emotional impact," while also saying the movie is "easier to be awed or impressed by it than moved." They compare the biography to being similar to a convertible more so than a movie, for its "superior craftsmanship" is better examined in bits than as a whole.
THR, meanwhile, says Jolie's film shows how "a great true story is telescoped down to a merely good one," with a "dynamite" first half-hour that "slowly slowly looses steam as it chronicles the inhuman dose of suffering endured by Olympic runner Louie Zamperini in Japanese internment camps during World War II." He blames the movie's inability to be great on Jolie's knack for "unduly inflating the heroics or injecting maudlin cliches." Indiewire, meanwhile, notes how Jolie's second effort in the director' chair "exacerbates its point through overstatement," with Jolie getting "too enamored of her subject to portray him as a human being." That said, however, they do ultimately praise Unbroken for it not "overreach(ing)" and for how it "retains unwavering commitment to hitting that target with the same resilience as Zamperini himself."
On the more negative side of things, however, are Variety, The Daily Telegraph and Screen Daily. Variety panned the movie being "an extraordinary story told in dutiful, unexceptional terms, the passionate commitment of all involved rarely achieving gut-level impact." The Telegraph, meanwhile, criticize how the movie "ruthlessly cauterised" the more troubling layer of Zamperini's story," resulting in Jolie's film being a "137-minute long film that gets us barely further than a poster." Screen Daily went on to say that "this lengthy drama will probably need awards season help if is to become more than a mid-level box officer performer."
Of course, there are some who don't fit in either category. Like Digital Spy, who said Unbroken is "poised to break into the Best Picture Oscar race." At this point, it will have to be seen if that comes true. With this year's Oscar race already tight, it's hard to tell if a mixed initial response will hurt the movie's Oscar chances. Oscar voters tend to like their work a little softer than most, so it is possible the audience-friendly filmmaking may ultimately speak in the voters' favor.
Image courtesy of INFPhoto.com