“Unbroken” is an extraordinarily handsome World War II movie made for people who are really into pain. Beatings, starvation, backbreaking toil, punch-ups, more beatings — it’s all here, ceaselessly.

Of course, this is what our late local hero, “Torrance Tornado” Louis Zamperini, suffered after the bomber he was on ditched into the Pacific Ocean and — 47 days later — he was picked up by the Japanese.

Angelina Jolie’s movie, adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling biography, spends what feels like the required minimum time on Zamperini’s misspent, 1920s youth (he’s played as a boy by the quiet yet soulful C.J. Valleroy) and his rise into a USC track star who eventually runs for the U.S. at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. (There are some nice Leni Riefenstahl-inspired shots for that but, disappointingly, no dramatization of Zamperini’s meeting with fan Adolf Hitler, nor stealing the Führer’s personal flag.)

As soon as Jolie can get him and two fellow crash survivors (Domhnall Gleeson and Finn Wittrock) on that sun-fried, shark-encircled and storm-tossed raft, though, it’s misery a la mode. Zamperini, from teen to bombardier, is played by Jack O’Connell, a tough English actor — check him out in the prison drama “Starred Up” — who’s convincing as both a wiry, world-class athlete and a wasting castaway who refuses to give in to certain mortality.

Once Zamperini comes under enemy control, however, it’s even more of an endurance test, pretty much to the exclusion of any personality traits beyond determination, high pain tolerance and loyalty to the land his parents immigrated to from Italy. Shipped from Kwajalein Atoll to a camp outside Tokyo not too long after he was captured, Zamperini finds himself at the mercy of a particularly mercurial and sadistic commandant, Mutsushiro Watanabe. Played with a strange but effectively unnerving feminine undercurrent by the Japanese pop star Miyavi (aka Takamasa Ishihara), Watanabe can’t decide if Zamperini is some weird friend of his or his personal piñata (he usually opts for the latter).

And so it goes for the duration; Zamperini’s postwar trials, triumphs and dedication to forgiveness are pretty much left for the sequel, although a few hints at his eventual spiritual awakening are dropped along the film’s torturous narrative path. (Joel and Ethan Coen, among many others, worked on the script.)

As she did with her first feature, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” Jolie exhibits a fascination with war’s torments through at least two-thirds of “Unbroken.” In that, she’s not too far afield from the movie’s most evident influences. We’ve already mentioned Riefenstahl (director of “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will”), but much more prominent are a kind of Spielbergian nostalgic glow/childlike thrill-of-action vibe in the earlier sections. The two big aerial sequences are particularly accomplished, thanks in no small part to the ingenious work of cinematographer Roger Deakins and a battalion of brilliant designers and practical/digital effects technicians.

As the war and the movie wear on, however, it becomes most reminiscent of a Mel Gibson production. Mortification simply comes to dominate all and the climactic battle of wills between Zamperini and Watanabe, at a hellish end-of-the-war-and-world coal-loading facility, all but literally evokes “The Passion of the Christ.” Like that bloody reverie, “Unbroken” is supposed to be inspirational.