he story of an alcoholic who finds redemption by coaching a high school basketball team, The Way Back sits awkwardly between muted character study and Disney sports movie, mercifully shying away from sentimental cliché yet failing to add enough depth to work as something more substantive. It sleepily hits the beats we expect but without the emotion or passion required to make them land, a by-the-numbers exercise from someone with barely enough energy to count.

Affleck is Jack Cunningham, a former high school basketball star whose days consist of working in construction and whose nights revolve around drinking himself into a stupor. What the film does manage to successfully convey is the sheer joylessness of drinking to excess for many addicts. Often on screen, we’ll see an alcoholic start the night as the life and soul of the bar before then falling into self-pitying darkness, but there’s something bracing about that being replaced with a sort of resigned compulsiveness instead. In one of the best scenes, we see Jack spend a night at home with a fridge filled with 30-odd cans of alcoholic beverages. His well-rehearsed routine of placing one in the freezer while starting another leaves him with an empty fridge by the time he mumbles himself to sleep, a bleak window into his lonely weekday life.

When he receives an offer from his old high school to coach the ailing basketball team, his initial instinct is to turn it down and what the film is less successful in showing is why his mind then suddenly changes. The majority of the basketball plot feels like it’s been implanted from elsewhere as the script, co-written by Gavin O’Connor and Out of the Furnace writer Brad Inglesby, has precious little interest in fleshing out the specifics of Jack’s coaching. There’s no real journey here to speak of: he arrives, barks a few orders, they start winning every game. It’s all far too easy and so what should have been rousing is instead decidedly flat. The kids Jack coaches are ciphers, with two or three of them allowed a brief scene each, but none of them ever coming close to resembling an actual person and there’s no real detail in any of his advice, no scenes of them trying and failing to work better as a team. It just sort of … happens.

The Way Back is a film stuck on the runway, quietly circling around, always threatening to fly but never managing to get off the ground. It was a cathartic experience for Affleck but for the rest of us, it carries very little weight.

– Compilation