A movie about an aged Martin Sheen walking The Camino de Santiago for the purpose of spreading his adventurous, dead son’s ashes out over the course of the route sounds like it should be pretty interesting. That the son is played by Sheen’s real life spawn, Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed this picture, adds even more intrigue. I mean, come on... Estevez made Men at Work, and that was awesome. Unfortunately, The Way is no Men at Work.
The only words I can think of to describe this movie are awkward and clumsy. We have a standard road trip structure, where a person on a journey meets some people and learns some lessons on their way; but instead of being content to trust in that structure, Estevez and the source material’s writer, Jack Hitt, feel the need to force-feed attempted poignancy into every scene, every character, and every exchange of dialogue. It all fails, and the process of watching it try so frequently and fail so thoroughly is exhausting. Even the jolly, comic relief character can’t be trusted to not be there with secret ulterior motives of making us cry.
Without question, The Way is a movie with its heart in the right place. It wants to be nice and inspiring, and it yearns to touch people. But its obvious yearning only makes its myriad failures all the more awkward to endure. This is a movie that can’t even photograph the French and Spanish countryside with any sort of artistic panache. By the time I had endured this film’s hour and fifty-five minute runtime, I felt like I had actually taken the entire 800km journey right alongside these miserable characters. Avoid at all costs.
