'Way' a weary slog

I was watching "Flight of the Phoenix" (the original, from 1965) the other day and was joined by a teen, who gave it about 40 seconds, then returned to his gaming cave.

A dozen middle-aged men in the desert arguing over water, in five-minute takes, backed by two sour guitar notes for a score? No thanks.

I wonder if today's "Scott Pilgrim" generation, accustomed to juggling the multiple stimuli of Facebook, texting and Nintendo, have the patience, or even mental wiring, to sit still for a movie like "Phoenix."

I doubt it, and that's too bad. Only by asking us to share the monotony of plane-crash survivors in "Phoenix" does director Robert Aldrich set up the movie's exquisite punch line, when we all learn what Hardy Kruger does for a living.

"Phoenix" was remade a few years ago with a rock score and a running time trimmed by half an hour and, of course, was not the same.

They don't make 'em like they used to, perhaps because they're afraid audiences won't sit still for 'em anymore.

This would certainly explain why a guy who can make 'em like they used to, Peter Weir, hasn't worked in seven long years, since "Master and Commander."

He returns with "The Way Back," a two-hour-plus epic of survival and endurance that stretches six characters and a few patches of terse dialogue over 140 minutes of spectacular wide-screen landscapes.

Weir adapts his fact-based story from Slavomir Rawicz's grueling memoir of his 1939 escape from a Siberian work camp and his incredible walk to freedom, south through Siberia, Tibet, over the Himalayas, to freedom in India, covering thousands of miles, living off the land.

This is right in Weir's sweet spot. He's been painting hypnotic landscapes on screen since "Picnic at Hanging Rock," given us the lovely agrarian rhythms of "Witness," and the man-amid-the-elements of "Master and Commander."

But "The Way Back," I'm sorry to say, is a bit of a whiff. Weir nails the visuals, as you might expect. He has a much harder time finding drama among his characters, something that would give the movie narrative propulsion.

And you can't fault the cast. Jim Sturgess plays Janusz, the stand-in for Rawicz, an anti-Stalinist Pole who recognizes right away that his work camp is really a death camp, and so recruits a leather-tough American (Ed Harris), a vicious criminal (Colin Farrell), and a few others to follow him through the wire and into a blizzard, when he knows they cannot be followed.

For the next two hours, natural leader Janusz manages the group's dangerously disparate personalities through physical and psychological challenges - the weak die off, stragglers (Saoirse Ronan) join the gang.

The gold standard for this sort of thing is "Papillon," and Werner Herzog gave us a decent version of it in "Rescue Dawn," movies that chart the effect of one inspiring and determined individual on others in captivity.

"The Way Back" can't conjure the same gripping dynamics, although its freedom-beats-death theme does peep though, and there's a nice scene in which we learn that Farrell's criminal, so long in Stalin's cage, lacks the imagination to even conceive of freedom.

But there are too few of these moments. "The Way Back," the story of a long walk to freedom, feels more about walking than freedom.