Metacritic reviews

There's a contemplative loveliness to The Way, an affecting personal project both for Emilio Estevez, who wrote, directed, and plays a small role, and for his father, Martin Sheen.

Gentle, likable and profoundly touching, it makes you want to dig out the hiking boots and make the same journey.

It's a plucky film that covers a lot of ground and uncovers this wonderful, ancient ritual that people of many faiths and from all walks of life take on.

It's a sweet and sincere family pilgrimage, even if a little too long and obvious. Audiences seeking uplift will find it here.

Essentially, The Way starts out as "Eat Pray Love" and takes a long, surprising trip toward becoming David Lynch's "The Straight Story." And that's a longer trip than a mere monthlong trek across Spain.

It works better as an idyllic travelogue through northern Spain than as a familial drama; despite the real-life relationship between filmmaker and star.

Estevez strains to prove his earnestness at every turn, undermining the film's good intentions with a surfeit of explanatory dialogue and a sappy adult-contemporary soundtrack. But for all his awkwardness Estevez is undeniably sincere, regarding both people and nature with disarming good will and maintaining a steady, soothing pace that allows the life lessons to resonate.

As a director, Estevez exhibits a bland visual sense, but he does manage to convey some of his scenic locations' multifaceted textures. Mostly, though, his dramatically inert, spiritually generic The Way seems like it was far more fun to shoot than it is to endure.

Here and there, the actor invests the kind of feeling that makes The Way come alive in human terms.

The making of The Way must have been a nice moment for father and son, but why must the rest of us suffer?