So went to see A Walk in the Woods, the new movie about walking the Appalachian Trail, based on the travel book of the same name and starring Robert Redford and the gristle that is what’s left of Nick Nolte’s voice. And… it’s not very good… and that is due, in part, to me not knowing what the movie was about because it surely only had a tangential relationship to the book.

For the uninitiated, Walk in the Woods (the book) was written in the 80s by travel writer Bill Bryson. It covers the history of the trail, the difficulty of walking it, the logistics you need to bring with you on your back, the culture of the hikers who are on the trail with you, and the culture of the towns that the trail passes. It’s a really cool and very funny book and the writer himself does take up the challenge of walking (some of) the trail so it has a through-line as a fun adventure book as well.

The movie stars Redford as a much older Bryson who decides to walk the trail because he’s in a creative rut and getting older and feeling his mortality. He is joined by a wildly out of shape friend played by Nolte and together they… just kind of amble along the trail, no big deal.

And that’s the problem with the movie – I have no idea what it’s about. Is it about walking the trail? Not really… they barely talk about it. Is it about old, out of shape men walking the trail? No, they never really have a problem (which is a real crime against the actual trail because you have to train hard before tackling it). Is it about two old friends reuniting for one last adventure? I guess that’s what it is… but it’s not very good at that either.

I think part of the problem – and this is a little sad – is that Redford wanted to make this movie ten years ago and he wanted it to co-star Paul Newman. Redford and Newman back together in a movie at the tail end of their careers would have brought something more to the movie than what is in the script. And this is no more evident than the scene where Redford and Nolte are trapped on a ledge above a roaring river… even without having known the history of the production (learned that later), it felt like this would have been the perfect chance to have a call back to Butch and Sundance and the ravine (“hell, the fall will probably kill us”.)

But, to the movie’s disservice, they left that scene in… and the script isn’t strong enough to justify it. In fact, the script is just chock full of wacky hijinx that have nothing to do with the trail or the culture around it. It’s kind of a low-key, low-ambition sort of adventure story, I guess. It makes a couple stabs at the natural history surrounding them in a small handful of short scenes and it has some pretty pedestrian, “isn’t this majestic” helicopter shots of the mountains but they come across as routine, like this kind of movie has to have them so here they are.

It has a few funny gags and there was certainly someone in the theater who was all in and laughing his ass off so apparently it can work for some. Not for me though.

Score: 67