'Way Back' is not-so great escape drama

I don't know about you, but I'm beginning to think that if you've seen one torturously dangerous escape-from-a-Siberian-gulag movie, you've kinda seen them all.

“The Way Back” comes from internationally celebrated Australian filmmaker Peter Weir, who directed such notable movies as “Witness,” “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” “The Last Wave,” “The Truman Show” and “The Dead Poets Society.”

Here, Weir directs a meticulously detailed epic escape adventure stuffed with everything but the one element his movie really needs: characters we can empathize with.

The normally charismatic Ed Harris and normally edgy Colin Farrell breathe a little life into their one-dimensional characters, but they're stuck leading a nondescript group of escapees so generic and banal that it's tough to worry about them being shot by Russians or dying of hunger in the wilderness or being fried alive in the desert.

“The Way Back” is “inspired by” a book by Slavomir Rawicz, “The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom,” plus other alleged true stories researched by Weir and co-writer Keith Clarke.

Shot in Bulgaria, Morocco and India, Weir's drama takes place in 1940 during Stalin's Reign of Terror in Poland.

A young woman, clearly against her will, accuses her husband Janusz (Jim Sturgess), a Polish army officer, of spying and crimes against the state.

The Russian authorities toss Janusz into the gulag clinker, a horrific, cadaver-cold place filled with bedbugs, lice, disease and the Urki, bad-butt street criminals like Valka (Farrell), who thinks nothing of casually knifing fellow prisoners to death.

Janusz constantly plots his escape, presumably so he can return to his betraying wife in a place run by the Soviets. He finally makes a break for it, accompanied by five fellow prisoners, including Valka and a grizzled American (Harris), identified as “Mr. Smith.”

If the escapees want to find sanctuary in India, they must travel 4,000 miles on foot past the Great Wall of China, through clouds of swarming mosquitoes, across the arid Gobi Desert and over the mountainous Himalayas.

Weir captures their trek in gruesomely realistic detail, from their bleeding, infected feet to their peeling facial skin under the desert sun.

Russell Boyd's camera lens drinks in the impressive vistas, including a faraway shot of a desert mirage recalling the David Lean-ish introduction of Omar Sharif in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Even with its splendid scenic settings, “The Way Back” sometimes feels like a feature travelogue, given our relative disinterest in the characters.

The group spends a lot of time walking around in the woods and dodging groups of soldiers, but at no point does Weir provide us with a suspenseful “Oh, no! They're going to get caught!” moment.

An unfortunate and unnecessary screen blurb at the beginning of “The Way Back” tells us that only three people survive the trip, so once the intrepid escapees get whittled down to a trio, we can breathe easy that nothing bad will happen to them from then on.

Even a welcome addition of a lost young Russian girl (“The Lovely Bones” star Saoirse Ronan) to the group fails to bring out more of the characters, except that Valka wants to leave her alone to die and Mr. Smith wants to protect her.

Granted, there aren't all that many torturously dangerous escape-from-a-Siberian-gulag movies out there.

At least “The Way Back” beats David Keith's 1985 TV movie “Gulag” on all counts.

<b>“The Way Back”</b>

★ ★ ½

<b>Starring:</b> Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess, Saoirse Ronan

<b>Directed by:</b> Peter Weir

<b>Other:</b> A New Market Films release. Rated PG-13 for language, nudity, violence. 133 minutes