Director Alejandro Monteverde explores the subjects of war, racism, faith, and God with the grace of a bull in a china shop in Little Boy, a WWII-set, theologically tipsy melodrama. I spent most of its 105-minute runtime staring at the movie screen quizzically, trying to figure out what exactly Monteverde was trying to say with his small-town tale about a racist half-pint trying to pray his father back from the front lines. The storytelling is manipulative, bludgeoning you over the head with blunt symbolism so incessantly you’re too punch-drunk (or uninterested) to know (or care) what’s going on. At best, the film’s messaging is outdated; at worst, it’s insensitive and difficult to bear.

The story revolves around Pepper Busbee (Jakob Salvati), a 7-year-old with a stunted-growth condition that’s made him the primary target of the bullies prowling the sunny streets of his coastal home town, O’Hare, California. He finds solace and inspiration, though, in his father, James (a miscast Michael Rappaport), his “only friend.” Pepper’s got his mom, Emma (Emily Watson), and his boorish teenage older brother, London (David Henrie), but his dad is his world; they go on imaginary adventures together, fighting evil-doers and pumping each other up with the rallying cry, “Do you believe you can do this?”, which is almost as cheesy and awkwardly written as The Imitation Game‘s, “Sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”

As broad as Morten Tyldum’s Alan Turing tribute was, Little Boy makes that movie look like a Lars Von Trier art piece. Little Pepper embarks on a pilgrimage of faith when James gets sent to the front lines in the Japanese-occupied Philippines. A local priest, Father Oliver (Tom Wilkinson), hands him a “magical list” of good deeds the boy must complete to bring his father home, and Pepper immediately gets to work. An extra task is tacked onto the end of the list, however: Pepper must befriend Hashimoto (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the universally hated Japanese-American man who lives on the edge of town. Pepper and London had trespassed on his property the night before, throwing rocks at his house as they screamed “Jap!!!” at the top of their lungs, so Father Oliver thought it best to teach the kid a lesson in acceptance.

Though the two don’t get along at first (Hashimoto is a bit of a curmudgeon and Pepper…well, Pepper greets him by saying, “Hi, Jap! I want to hang out!”), they soon find a common bond in that they’re both town outcasts, Hashimoto for his ethnicity and culture, Pepper for his diminutive stature. (It’s clear who got dealt the worse hand, but the film treats their struggles as if they were equal, because racism.) The hot-headed London disapproves of his little brother’s new friendship to say the least; when he comes home to find Hashimoto sitting at the kitchen table, eating hot dogs with his family, his gut reaction is to stick a rifle in the poor man’s nose.

One of the movie’s most uncomfortable motifs is born out of Pepper’s fanaticism for a popular traveling magician, Ben Eagle (Ben Chaplin). Eagle stops in O’Hare on his national tour and invites our tiny hero up on stage to help him with an illusion, asking him to move a glass across a table with his mind. Pepper stretches his arms out in front of him like Magneto, makes the most horrendous sound you’ve ever heard (think constipation) and…presto! The glass slides toward him, Jedi-style. He attempts the mind trick over and over again throughout the film, with the occasional contrivance making it appear (to the dimwitted townsfolk, at least) as if the boy were a miracle worker of some sort.

History spoiler: “Little Boy” is the name of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Monteverde and co-writer Pepe Portillo handle the catastrophic event in the most agonizing way possible, showing the citizens of O’Hare rejoicing in the streets as they smile and scream at Pepper, “You did it, Little Boy! You did it!” What the hell? I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. The thought crossed my mind that someone might be playing an elaborate prank on me; I half-expected the theater lights to raise, everyone in the audience to turn their heads, point, and laugh in my face. It was a true Twilight Zone moment.

To be clear, the filmmakers don’t advocate the Hiroshima bombing (I don’t think), but that they had the nerve to use a historical event that cost the lives of 129,000 Japanese men, women and children as a plot device in the story of an American boy who misses his dad is obnoxious.

In a film about supernatural saviors, the only true saviors are Watson and Wilkinson, whose intermittent appearances act as the only gasps of breath you’ll get in this goopy vat of preachy nostalgia that’ll only appeal to aging Christians, preppy youth counselors and their little minions. Christian rock music sucks not because it’s about Christianity, but because the music sucks. That principle can be applied to Little Boy as well; its faith-based cinema that’s well-intentioned enough, but fails badly because, as a piece of cinema, it’s decidedly sub-par. In the end, that’s all that really matters.

Unbroken‘s most hard-to-watch, brutal scenes see WWII U.S. Airforce bombadier Louis Zamperini (played by a commanding Jack O’Connell) getting thrashed and beaten to oblivion at the hands of a sadistic Japanese prison sergeant called “The Bird” (Japanese singer Miyavi). Over and over again, we see The Bird torture and ridicule Zamperini, and over and over again we watch the Italian-American soldier endure. About the resilience of one man’s mind, body, and spirit in the face of unending pain and indignity, Angelina Jolie‘s POW prestige piece (“a true story”, according to the film’s intro) is an excruciating watch, but the too neatly-packaged structuring and presentation act as something of a blockade between us and Zamperini’s mind. Never do we feel like we’re experiencing his suffering with him; we’re watching from behind the glass of an exhibit at the Hollywood History museum.

An olympic runner before his stint carpet bombing Japanese bases from the Southern Pacific skies and getting in dogfights with Zero planes, Zamperini was aboard a B-24 along with a handful of comrades when it crashed in the middle of the ocean. He along with remaining survivors Francis “Mac” McNamara (Finn Wittrock) and Alan “Phil” Phillips (Domhnall Gleeson), survived for over a month on a raft, dodging fighter plane fire and hungry sharks. “Mac” didn’t make it past day 33, but Louie (as his friends called him) and “Phil” held out for two more weeks before being apprehended by an enemy naval ship. From the moment Louie stepped foot in the Japanese prison until the end of the war, he was treated like trash, kicked in the stomach, punched in the face from sunup ’til sundown by his fellow American captors (they were forced to by The Bird, as part of one of his sick torture strategies), and subjected to all manner of mental and physical abuse. He weathered the storm like only a hero could, and when the war (and the beatings) ended, he went on to raise a happy family and live to the age of 97. (He died last year of pneumonia.)

Zamperini’s story (told in the autobiography written by Laura Hillenbrand the movie is based on) is as awe-inspiring as any you’ll hear, but Jolie and screenwriters Joel and Ethan Coen (yes, they do write scripts once every blue moon) take a storytelling approach that’s too rudimentary and overly respectful. Unbroken should feel like a horror movie (I can’t imagine a more frightening existence than Zamperini’s time in the prison), but instead feels like a pedestrian, gussied-up biopic. Flashbacks to Zamperini’s youth are so overly poetic sometimes it feels icky. “A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory,” his brother says to him with perfect diction as he rolls away on a train to go to war.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins (one of the greats) does what he usually does and composes some stunning, immaculate images. What I wonder, though, is if Jolie’s influence caused Deakins to pretty up the movie’s aesthetic a bit too much; some close-up shots of O’Connell, even when he’s being smashed in the face, feel too glossy and borderline-glamorous for the subject matter. Whether this was Jolie’s artistic choice, Deakins’, or both, the beautifully-lit, unadventurous visuals don’t pair well with the crushing misery Zamperini lived in, nor does the moody, melodramatic score.

What the Hollywood, restrained style does speak to very well, though, is Zamperini’s abnormal level of nobility. O’Connell is wonderful, the definition of a leader, a man whose shoulders could hold up a nation. In one of the film’s most advertised scenes, The Bird forces a starving, injured Zamperini to hold up a steel beam above his head, ordering his lackey to kill him if he drops it. Portraying her subject in an overtly Christ-like fashion wasn’t the most palatable choice in my estimation; when O’Connell pushes the beam up to the heavens overhead and roars with primal rage at his tormentor The Bird, the film abandons its anchor in reality and things get uncomfortable. You can’t fault O’Connell, though, as he gives every scene his all, no matter how cringe-worthy the material gets. Miyavi is a perfect heel in his screen debut, exuding an almost sexual delight when punishing his hapless prisoners. There’s a palpable spark between the two young actors and for any scene that’s successful in earning Zamperini sympathy, Miyavi deserves half the credit.