Unbroken: Path to Redemption

Evangelicals were outraged when Angelina Jolie’s 2014 film adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling biography Unbroken omitted the details of subject Louis Zamperini’s post-WWII life, which saw him struggle with alcoholism and PTSD until he found Jesus at a Billy Graham revival. Leave it to Christian-themed production company Pure Flix and God’s Not Dead director Harold Cronk to fill in those blanks with this clunky biopic, a film of such cornball earnestness that you almost long for the fetishized torture of Jolie’s film. Samuel Hunt takes over the role of Zamperini, an Olympic athlete who survived a plane crash, spent 47 days floating in shark-infested waters and endured over 2 years of nightmare-inducing torture in various Japanese POW camps before getting sent home in 1945. Unbroken: Path to Redemption follows Zamperini from his homecoming through his conversion, and even manages to keep the naked proselytizing and ham-handed dream sequences to a minimum for the first twenty to thirty minutes.