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90A grueling, stunningly photographed story.
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88The Way Back diligently catalogs the outrages through which extreme cold, hunger and thirst put the body, and Weir's camera finds the terrible beauty in his actors' chapped lips, windburned cheeks and tenderized feet.
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88The director, 66, brings his passion for precision to every frame of the film, refusing to hype or Hollywoodize the detailed richness of the story.
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83This is old-school monumental filmmaking, without CGI tricks or many soundstage comforts for a dedicated cast. David Lean would probably approve.
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80The overall metaphor Weir was aiming for - this idea of enemies so powerful and a war so menacing and confusingly big that no place seems safe except a place absurdly far away - comes through clearly and stays with you.
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80The man-versus-the-natural world story is in Weir's wheelhouse, and Harris and Farrell get into a scene-stealing duel. Worth the trek.
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80Beyond its visual splendors, however, the film achieves searing moral power.
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75Weir has an epic imagination but, unlike, say David Lean, he doesn't fill out the epic vision with epic characters. The result is a film that seems simultaneously grand and skimpy.
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75Part "The Great Escape" and part "Lawrence of Arabia, " Weir's epic The Way Back is ambitious in scope, grand in vision and rich with examples of the resilience of the human spirit.
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75Stirring as it frequently is, The Way Back is a good movie that should have been a classic.
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75Weir is the real deal, and his gifts more than repay the time you invest in the film.
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75As Russell Boyd's remarkable cinematography emphasizes the dwarfing grandeur of the surrounding topography, Weir shows how the corresponding smallness of individuals is compensated for by the grandeur of their aspiration.
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75Whether it is truth, fiction or, most likely, a little of each, the story Weir tells is a powerful parable of man's charge for freedom and his humbling by nature.
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75It's earnest and well-acted and sturdily filmed: We're in good hands and we know it.
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75Well-acted and artfully (though conventionally) made, The Way Back tells a compelling story, regardless of whether it's based on truth or a fabrication.
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75It's also filled with scenes of extraordinary survival challenges. But the result is oddly impersonal and undifferentiated.
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75An entertaining old-fashioned prison escape movie with a touch of the epic about it.
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70It's impossible not to cry at their suffering, but whether you'll feel anything is another story.
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Jan 19, 201170Weir's artisan's sureness grants a bewitching calm - his trademark ambience - to this harrowing tale.
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63The movie makes for quite a hike. It's also, at times, a bit of a slog.
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63You would expect an epic with brains and hearts. Instead we settle for sturdy craft, with a stellar cast struggling to breathe life into the cold material.
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63The Way Back, with its epic story and spectacularly bleak setting, invites comparisons with "Laurence of Arabia" and "Dr. Zhivago." It's awash in vast, unforgiving terrain. So it got the setting right, but not necessarily the substance.
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63The result is a brisk trot through a story that is, at heart, a tough slog.
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63There is an irony here. The film exhibits an admirable determination to do justice to a real story, but the story's not real.
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60The Way Back then takes its time, creeping through gorgeous locations in Bulgaria, Morocco and Pakistan, and basically feeling like a two-hour-plus version of the desert scene from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."
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60Weir couldn't make a boring film if his life depended on it, and for any other director The Way Back would be laudable. It's good, but from this director we have come to expect great.
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Jan 14, 201160In its best moments is as big as a movie can be, as big as life itself.
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50Ultimately, however, The Way Back fails to connect on the all-important visceral, emotional level.
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50Most of those hardships are familiar to movie lovers; that's a reductionist view of a serious and ambitious production, but it is, after all, a movie on a screen. (And a movie with a dreadfully clumsy ending.)
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50Its stop-and-start feel keeps you from ever getting fully absorbed in the story.
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50Despite the two-hours-plus running time, major plot developments like the actual escape and the eventual departure of Colin Farrell's hardened Stalinist flit by so quickly that they barely register.
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50His (Weir) hardship drama is stolidly old-fashioned, more extreme travelogue than exercise in visceral horror.
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Jan 14, 201150This arduous travelogue focuses on the macro (stunning, David Lean-like landscapes) and the micro (countless closeups of blistered flesh) to the virtual exclusion of compelling characters.