2025 | rated R | starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Mark Hamil, Judy Greer | directed by Francis Lawrence | 1 hr 48 mins | 4 out of 5 stars |
2025 Halloween Horrorfest #6
Stephen King has written so many books for so long that not only can you throw a rock in Hollywood and hit another Stephen King adaptation, but you can hit all the author’s revival periods: from the 70s adaptations to the 90s TV movies to the post-It remakes to the Mike Flanigan adaptations. They’re a dime a dozen. Most of them get by on a high concept premise and gruesome execution, but truly good ones, where the material and the filmmaker match and share the same vision are rare. When they hit, they hit bit and inspire a new renaissance cycle. Frank Darabont with The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, Rob Reiner with Misery. Andy Muscheitti with It and Mike Flannigan with his intimately profound deconstruction of King’s work with Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep and this year’s The Life of Chuck. Now you can join dystopian director Francis Lawrence to that list, who brings the nearly unfilmable 70s Vietnam satire The Long Walk to life in a just-as-timely modern America.
In a post-apocalyptic American future, people are given hope from their poverty and devastation by an annual televised TV contest called The Long Walk, in which a teenage boy from every state competes in a walking challenge. The rules are simple: stop, slow down or step off the path and you get shot in the head by the surrounding rolling army and you keep walking until only one is left to claim the prize, a wish that can make all your dreams come true.
In this case, The Long Walk’s strength is in its simplicity. It’s Speed but if you walk below 3 mile per hour, you die. A film where 90% of the screentime is a camera set on a group of kids talking as they walk down a desolate street. Make that interesting – that’s the challenge put forth to director Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games sequels) and writer J.T. Mollner (last year’s Strange Darling) who rise to that challenge in the most impressive of ways. Mollner and Lawrence lean hard into that simplicity, making the film as stripped down as possible. You’re going to get a flashback here or there, but not to the extent that a more anxious filmmaker would. You’re not going to get the backstories spelled out of the participants or the history of the American collapse up until that point. The movie stays in the moment and knows that if the kids are written real and well that it will carry everything else. It’s a bold movie that makes The Long Walk work so well.
Without a lot of plot twists and turns to deal with, Mollner and Lawrence rightly focus on the boys’ budding relationships. We start with Garraty (Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza) who has the most intense reason to win but a strategy to get the guys to form alliances and help each other. He becomes good friends with McVries (David Jonsson, Alien Romulus) and their friendship becomes the heart of the film. Each character has a distinct personality, their backstory may come out in their conversation, and they may have a mini-arc or get gunned down early. In this anything-can-happen scenario Ben Wang, Charlie Plummer and Tut Nyuot stand out as characters and different voices in the movie’s ongoing debates. Wang, the supersticious one, Plummer the guilty bully, Nyuot the faithful. And they’re orbited by other characters who refuse to be part of the alliance but play critical roles all the same.
Mollner’s ear for King’s crass, vulgar teenage dialog is on point. The boys mock each other, bond with each other, insult each other as guys do in an entertaining sign of pure, resilient, masculinity in the face of near certain death. And when the death’s come they are brutal, unflinching and unforgiving. Given in this scenario death can only come one way, the movie finds a surprising number of ways to keep each death fresh and shocking each time revealing small dangers of the walk that can turn life threatening, like needing to use the bathroom, getting a rock in your shoe, a sprained ankle or walking up a steep hill. As things get worse, thoughts of rebellion creep in and the group seeks to challenge their Major (Mark Hamill) who rides along-side them barking out patriotic encouragement for the cause they are dying for.
What’s so visceral and chilling about the movie is that it doesn’t take long for the viewer to realize that the characters are all just marching toward their own death. The more they walk the more tired they get and the more likely something will happen that will result in a bullet to the head. The hopeless inevitability that hangs in the air of the film is its most powerful horror. We’re all walking in that direction, just some taking a more direct path than others.
You’d think a movie about walking would be torture to sit through, and that it’s so entertaining and so viscerally thriller thanks to a solid script and direction that pulls it out of the bore it could have been. It’s one of the more unique and daring King adaptations in recent memory.