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Ed Harris, left, leads a cast of refugees escaping from a Siberian gulag in 1940 in Peter Weir’s “The Way Back.” |
I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to think that if you’ve seen one torturously dangerous escape-from-a-Siberian-gulag movie, you’ve kinda seen them all.
“The Way Back” comes from internationally celebrated Australian filmmaker Peter Weir, who directed such notable movies as “Witness,” “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” “The Last Wave,” “The Truman Show” and “The Dead Poets Society.”
Here, Weir directs a meticulously detailed epic escape adventure stuffed with everything but the one element his movie really needs: characters we can empathize with.
The normally charismatic Ed Harris and normally edgy Colin Farrell breathe a little life into their one-dimensional characters, but they’re stuck leading a nondescript group of escapees so generic and banal that it’s tough to worry about them being shot by Russians or dying of hunger in the wilderness or being fried alive in the desert.
“The Way Back” is “inspired by” a book by Slavomir Rawicz, “The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom,” plus other alleged true stories researched by Weir and co-writer Keith Clarke.
Shot in Bulgaria, Morocco and India, Weir’s drama takes place in 1940 during Stalin’s Reign of Terror in Poland.
A young woman, clearly against her will, accuses her husband Janusz (Jim Sturgess), a Polish army officer, of spying and crimes against the state. (Read more…)