A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods might better have been called Tame (as opposed to Wild). Unlike Wild, Walk was supposed to be a comedy, but the laughs were few and far between, none of which were worthy of a belly laugh, maybe only a quiet chuckle or two. And Robert Redford, as travel writer Bill Bryson, is certainly no comic. He may have come close to comedy in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but that was a long time ago. Now, when they shoot a closeup of his face, he looks like he should be carved on a mountain, with all the crags and bumps a mountain would provide. It's a face much better suited to his role in All Is Lost. The two men, Bryson and his long-ago friend Katz (Nick Nolte), take on the impossible task of hiking the 2200 miles of the Appalachian Trail. The story is strung out in a series of comic vignettes, tied together by the trail and the people the two men meet along the way. We have the obligatory lone pain-in-the-ass hiker Mary Ellen (The Last Man in the World’s Kristen Schaal, who plays the role exactly as she does in Last Man); we have the obligatory sexual encounter between Katz and a bountiful lady he meets at a laundromat, followed by the obligatory husband chasing after Katz; we have the hint of a sexual relationship between Bryson and a motel owner (Mary Steenburgen); and then the obligatory tumble off the side of a cliff to a shelf below where the two men comically try to find a way to get back on the trail. As I said earlier, this was a nice stroll in the park, not very funny, not very original, but filled with breathtaking scenes along the Appalachian Trail. And it had a nice PG-13 rating. I’d give it a quiet two and a half stars out of five.