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The Road To Galena Review: Familiar Drama Is Too Safe & Unmemorable
Movies like The Road to Galena present a challenge to film critics. The age of Rotten Tomatoes has ossified the notion that reviews are either positive or negative, but there are many films that live in a space between enthusiastic endorsement and scalding dismissal, where the customary adjectives hardly seem appropriate. They are an emotional doldrums of sorts, eliciting no reaction, whether for or against, that is strong enough to encourage more than a passing conversation. How, then, is one supposed to generate legible, even diverting prose about their viewing experience? Without simplifying the exercise by allowing the assessment communicated here to swing artificially in either direction, the best option seems to accept The Road to Galena as a safe story safely told, and highlight a few ways the movie could've made more of what it had to work with.