Movie Review: "The Way Back" Sees Sad Affleck Go From Meme to Movie

It’s also a basketball flick, so that’s fun!

If you thought Ben Affleck was bummed playing Batman, wait until you see The Way Back, which is the moment Sad Affleck goes from meme to movie.

No longer a trust-fund vigilante with an endless array of gadgets who gets the distinct honour of punching Jared Leto's Joker square in the jaw, Affleck here portrays a washed-up high school basketball legend nursing a chip on his shoulder and carrying an incurable case of ill-defined grief. Well, he tries to cure it, I suppose, and in an early sequence, we see him polish off an entire carton of beer to quiet his inner turmoil. No, that is not a typo. An entire carton. This guy, the film wants you to know, is an alcoholic, and with an apparently incredible bladder as well.

Given Affleck's own personal, well-documented demons, The Way Back could have been an over-serious exercise in self-pity; a conniving play for awards recognition without anything actually meaningful to say about addiction. And yet, unlike in his four (4!) appearances as Bruce Wayne, The Way Back nonetheless allows Affleck to show off that familiar spark behind his eyes. Even as Jack Cunningham, the cautionary tale of his high school’s basketball system, we get glimpses of his magnetic charisma. When he's summoned back to coach his old team, and help them make their first playoff run in 25 years, we see how, exactly, this sad sack might rally to inspire the disaffected kids on the roster. His Batman could never.

Director Gavin O'Connor isn’t ashamed of making straight-ahead sports flicks (nor should he be). His 2011 feature Warrior (about brothers who wind up in an MMA cage fight) is actually one of the best ever. It helps if you accept that sports flicks, by design, are usually a little cheesy: here you have to believe a bottom-dwelling team can make a run for the title, which is a bit like suddenly hoping the Knicks can topple the Eastern Conference simply because they got a new coach who could spit some inspirational speeches. At least writer Brad Ingelsby gives Affleck good speeches to spit.

There's undeniably something affecting about O'Connor's melancholy filmmaking style, what with his grainy handheld camera and open-chord score (which fuses cheerleading chants and sober drumlines with drowsy guitar). Basically, he's trying to make Friday Night Lights but for basketball, and I definitely am not complaining.

Still, sports fans should know, going in, that this is more about a man overcoming his alcoholism than an actual high school basketball campaign. That may prove disappointing, especially in the third act, when attention drifts away from the court just as the games start to get exciting. However, there’s honesty in the underlying message: that mental toughness is necessary in the arena, and that sporting success can’t mask the baggage being carried by its players. Last month, a grieving Lakers team paid tribute to their late hero Kobe Bryant in an emotional ceremony, before playing their first game since his death. In a movie, the screenwriter would have written a triumphant victory over the Portland Trail Blazers. But grief is not a winning ingredient, nor a motivating factor. The Lakers lost, because these wounds aren't bandaged easily. The Way Back gets that too.

3/5

The Way Back arrives in Australian cinemas 5 March 2020. Rated M for mature themes, coarse language and sexual references.