Angelina Jolie’s 2014 adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s
Unbroken felt incomplete in cutting off Louis Zamperini’s true story before the years after his experience as a World War II POW. This faith-based follow-up—from
God’s Not Dead director Harold Cronk—simply feels incomplete in a different way. As Louis (Samuel Hunt) returns stateside, and eventually marries his wife Cynthia (Merritt Patterson), he wrestles with alcoholism as a coping mechanism for the post-traumatic stress of his harrowing wartime suffering. Cronk captures those stresses in effectively surreal nightmares and hallucinations—like Louis’s living-room couch abruptly turning into a raft on the ocean—and there’s a solid anchor in the relationship between Louis and Cynthia. There’s also an overriding melodrama to the proceedings—including Hunt’s performance of frustration and drunken rages—as the attempts to fill in the blanks on the awfulness depicted in
Unbroken feel like filler on the way to the inevitable born-again moment. Maybe there’s a way to do justice to the entirety of Louis Zamperini’s fascinating life, but nobody has found it yet.
By
Scott Renshaw