Rated The Way 6/10
This movie was the subject of some sort of college tour Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez were doing and they came to Virginia Tech. I believe they screened it at the class of a popular wine professor. Early Blacksburg Twitter talked about it a fair bit. Not surprisingly, given the themes of faith and Catholicism, this was one of several DVDs in my in-laws' collection and I grabbed it to finally close the loop on the marketing hype of the era.It was pretty good - within the standards of Hallmark Boomer Cinema. I appreciate the attempt to introduce fun side characters, but they kind of function more like stage characters than film ones. There's an irony, because Estevez and crew are committed to showing us that the characters have interiority. They just haven't mastered the art of using film to convince us that's the case.The Way also made me realize that if I ever made a film, I can't just use my favorite college rock tracks like Estevez did with The Shins. It will not work more often than it does work! The Garden State music people knew what they were doing, but not every film team does.