A Walk in the Woods was not on my radar of movies to go out to the theater to see, but when the weekend came and there wasn't anything out that I desperately wanted to see I decided to go see this, because the trailer reminded my of one of my favorite movies The Way. To my shock, and there are lots of shocks about this film, it wasn't anywhere close to The Way, and ended up being just two old guys trying to prove they can do something and ending up learning life lessons along the way, just without any depth to it all.
The first thing about this film that I couldn't believe was the fact that this is rated R. Yep, a feel good movie about old guys is rated R. I didn't know this going into the film, I thought it would be PG maybe PG-13 at most, but nope, we got Nick Nolte who has a sailor's mouth. I don't know how many F bombs are in the film, but man does it feel like it's used in exchange for every other word.
The other surprise I had with this film was how sexual it was. You don't see anything, but throughout the whole film the old guys, especially Nolte's character, is usually talking about something dirty from their first blow jobs to making secret affairs on the road. The last shock that I wasn't expecting was how funny this film is. Like I said, I was expecting a film similar to The Way, in that it had comedy but it focused on character, and boy that isn't this movie.
While I did enjoy the film, it wasn't as much of an enjoyment as I would have liked since the film is mainly a comedy about these old guys getting laughs off how old they are. Seriously, every joke in this movie, or 90%, is an old guy joke. To make matters worse, the comedy was really forced some of the time. For instance there's this scene where the two guys meet Kristen Schaal's character, her the whole joke is that she talks so much and puts people down to the point of them wanting to escape from her. Not only is that done in practically every comedy and we've seen it done a million times to death, but her character was just so unlikable that I felt angry whenever she was on screen. The "make fun of people so they can laugh" bits fell so flat that if people were laughing it was under the pretense that it was too uncomfortable to watch, which is another problem with the film.
A lot of times I felt uncomfortable watching this film. I don't know it it's because these seventy year olds are acting like their in their twenties, or because this film smells like it's pleading the audience to like it, but if I wasn't laughing at a good joke I was either laughing uncomfortably, or asking myself if it was worth it to see this. And that's where the biggest problem lies: was it worth going to see this, and even now after three days of pondering this movie I'm still not entirely sure, because after leaving the theater I didn't feel like I got anything out of this, nor did I feel the constant comedy was enough for me to say this was a good film.
At the end of the day, this film had a great concept that could have had a lot of potential, but instead the writers decided to up the laughs and make an almost making fun of old people in a nudge-nudge type of way that they wouldn't feel insulted. I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy parts of it, quite a bit of the jokes were funny, but it was so constant and beating you over the head that these guys are old and can't do what young people can that I feel uncomfortable watching it. It may have had good intentions, and I know people in my theater were laughing throughout most of it, but as I'm writing this all down I'd say if you want a laugh and there's nothing in the theaters then go see this as a matinee, don't pay full price, there's not enough substance to it that I'd hoped for, and I left the theater with a mixture of disappointment and laughs.
RATING: OKAY
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