There are a precious few good films about walking. Most are quite bad. Nick Hallissey grabs the popcorn to sort the clunkers from the corkers.
IT SHOULD BE so simple. Take beautiful location, add friendships, conversations, complications, a story, perhaps a decent tune or two, and create magic. And yet the history of walking movies is not so much magic as tragic, usually involving clichéd characters, forced storylines and the following assumptions:
1) There has to be at least one ‘eccentric’ character, possibly several
2) And at least one very annoying character
3) Everyone must get ‘comically’ lost at some point because no-one brings a map
4) Everyone is going to end up either miserable, angry or implausibly naked at some point
5) And everyone will grudgingly make friends/ fall in love in the end.
And perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if those clichés all came together in a pleasing, original way. But all too often, they don’t. To prove the point, we’ve rounded up some examples.
(But to sweeten the pill, we’ve also found the precious few that actually get walking right.)
The Dreadful
Downhill (2014)
Billed as ‘a British road movie’, Downhill has a simple and promising premise: four friends set off to combat their various midlife catastrophes by walking the Coast to Coast, shooting a hand-held movie of their escapades as they go. The trouble is, the team is a cluster of clichés (especially Ned Dennehy as the irritating Julian, a sort of poundshop Withnail), the escapades are deadly dull, the weather is dismal, and nobody seems to enjoy it very much. Still, Stephen Fry called it ‘a tremendous new British comedy’ at the time, and it boasts an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps there’s something we’re missing?
The Disappointing
A Walk in the Woods (2015)
Adapted from the most popular book ever written about walking, and starring Robert Redford as Bill Bryson and Nick Nolte as his eccentric pal Katz, this should have been the best walking movie of them all. And fair play, the photography is fantastic. But strangely, the story of Bryson’s Appalachian Trail misadventure falls flat on screen. Perhaps it’s because it’s so curtailed, being unable to replicate all the great moments from the book. Or perhaps we
