Given how brutal and simplistic The Long Walk is, it is honestly surprising that the title of Stephen King’s novel wasn’t The Vietnam War Is Wrong and Bad. The film adaptation arrives against at a time when dystopian nightmares and whatever passes for news reports have become near-perfect doppelgangers. That doesn’t mean the movie is well-timed or particularly revealing…
The point of The Long Walk appears to be that authoritarian leadership that leads to widespread economic hardship and highly publicized violence is bad. It is wildly upsetting that this is still an argument that very much needs to be made to far too many people. That said, our fiction cannot simply remain in the business of holding up familiar ugliness, pointing at it, and going “No. Bad.” King wrote this novel in the 1960s in college. Let’s go ahead and say that this particular type of art has failed to meet its American objective over the last fifty years of trying.
To be specific: The Long Walk is a copious amount of sad-talking punctuated by graphic footage. This is because, at least in part, King loves to be really gross. That’s not a condemnation or judgment, so much as it is an objective fact. The amount of street poops here are Exhibits A-Z. Defenders will leap up and say that the disgusting elements here are the whole point. And yeah, no duh. This whole thing is one big “no duh” that leads to a conclusion that is wholly “duh.”
The film primarily follows Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), who joins the annual Long Walk, which is only slightly dumber than a regular marathon. You see, in an alternate America after an ill-defined war, one volunteer teenaged boy from each state is chosen by lottery to compete for a bunch of money and one “wish” by walking nonstop until only one remains alive. They are supervised by The Major (Mark Hamill), a feckless military leader whose strength comes entirely from his extra-oversized aviators, which he even wears at night.
Raymond quickly befriends Peter McVries (David Jonsson). And the two spend the next few days saying each other’s names to one another more than most any actual best friends have in a lifetime. That could be because writer JT Mollner’s script is a mild monstrosity, but we’ll get there. Other contestants pop in and out of the primary pack. Because this is a war parable, they get the soldier treatment, wherein each walking warrior gets exactly one defining characteristic like “chews gum” or “generally sucks.”
Jonsson is so good that he very nearly makes this watchable. Hoffman is the opposite. I was going to feel bad slagging on the kid, but he’s a nepo baby (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s kid), so I feel less remorse in telling you that his line delivery is nigh-unlistenable and his whole performance is nigh-unwatchable. Everyone walks until the inevitable conclusion, which is, at best, unhelpful.
Director Francis Lawrence’s work on this and The Hunger Games series cements him as Hollywood’s go-to supervisor of big-screen teenage murder. He really does nothing to dress up this literal walk-and-talker. It doesn’t help that he was working from a script by Mollner, who did Strange Darling, which is literally one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my entire life. It takes three to officially make a pattern, but between his last movie and this one, I feel confident in saying that Mollner’s grotesque, nihilistic, brutality-for-brutality’s-sake vision of the world is very much not for me.
So, who is The Long Walk for? It’s definitely not for folks who look at the world around them and say “I like where things are going!” If the last hundred years or so of modern art haven’t convinced those people that iron-gloved violent oppression is not cool, this will not be what pushes them into reason. However, this is also not for anyone dramatically concerned about, you know, everything. And those are pretty much the two groups of adult humans alive these days: those who don’t care and those who do.
This isn’t working. Fiction can’t keep holding mirrors to societal ugliness without genuine reflection, especially with an end that says “And who knows where we go from here?” Such works aren’t just useless, they are apparently being misread as supporting the bad guys by huge swaths of the populace. Maybe the first step in holding real-world leaders accountable begins by demanding that our overtly moralizing parables do more than nebulously suggest that bad things are bad and that doing something about bad things would be good.
This is all to say that The Long Walk is surprisingly poorly made and super uncomfortable, which is somehow earning it praise from well-intended people who wish the world would get better. Not like this.
Grade = D
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Shakyl Lambert at CGMagazine says “The Long Walk is a film I haven’t stopped thinking about since I saw it. Even with how horrifyingly brutal it gets, its strong focus on character work helps the film never lose its humanity. It’s a movie I did not expect to feel so moved by. It’s one of the best movies of the year, bar none.”
Nathalia Aryani at The MovieMaven says “The Long Walk is grueling and gripping, harrowing and terrorizing, mixed with humanity and spirit, familial bond and friendship, care and sacrifice.”
André Hereford at Metro Weekly says “Current events have caught up with King’s cracked future, supplying a palpable undercurrent of real-world tension to the sight of soldiers in tanks and Humvees marching brave but frightened teens down this doomed road.”
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