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 beer. 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.The Way Back 2020 Movie Download.
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 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 far too easy and so what should have been rousing is instead decidedly flat. O’Connor who previously made the more openly formulaic sports pic Miracle for Disney, is clearly aware of the crowd-pleasing structure of the subgenre and he recycles it here adequately but without any real verve.