Robert Redford and Nick Nolte are fine actors, yet even they cannot save the one note story of a long journey to nowhere in A Walk in the Woods.

If Into the Wild & Wild are epic journeys of mind and spirit, and The Way a pilgrimage of immense spiritual significance, then A Walk in the Woods is merely just that. Based on the book from travel writer Bill Bryson, this Ken Kwapis directed drama is curiously mundane in all its facets, never able to rise above its dry tone nor have its audience connect to characters who although portrayed by fine actors, are not at all memorable.

Robert Redford stars as Bryson, reluctantly semi-retired and settling back in America after years living in Britain. When we first meet Bryson he's the subject on an awkward television interview where immediately his personality is on show: stubborn, intelligent, with little patience for fools and even less for deportment, Redford convincingly hitting all attributes.

With the realisation of his mortality fast becoming apparent, Bryson attempts to wind back the clock and attack the Appalachian Trail, a 3500 km hiking trek not for the faint of heart. 

To the insistence of his less than impressed wife (Emma Thompson, stealing scenes in minimum screen time), Bryson is to find someone willing to accompany him on his lunatic adventure, with the only taker willing to gear up a former travel buddy from the 60s named Stephen Katz.

Portrayed by a brilliantly cast Nick Nolte, Katz is the walking epitome of a heart attack, Nolte's now famed gasping grunts and shuffling, laboured walk, hardly hiking material.

Together Bryson and Katz head off on their adventure, and the usual tropes of interesting people met along the way and breathtaking sights to behold, follow suit.

What's missing is a sense of purpose, that spiritual fuel that drives these men to do what they're doing and give us a reason to watch them reach whatever goal or ambition they have in front of them.

Also absent is personality. A Walk in the Woods is very much a dry movie, with Kwapis not able to inject much of anything to proceedings, or work their varied charisma of Redford and Nolte to the films advantage.

Kwapis is most known as a journeyman director of varied TV sitcoms and sub-par feature comedies. Considering the pedigree of talent involved on A Walk in the Woods, one would think a dramatic director of clout could have done something much better with this material.