The Long Walk Review: Stephen King at His Most Nihilistic Done Justice

Anybody can win. This is the maxim Americans are told, and which they tell themselves, from the cradle to the grave. If you work hard enough, try hard enough, are simply good enough, you too can be a millionaire; a billionaire; or these days an autocrat above the laws of gods and men. Of course to be on the top means, by default, you will have stepped over someone along the way to that finish line tape. It’s a deeper truth that perhaps has never been so vividly visualized as in the new adaptation of Stephen King’s first completed novel, The Long Walk.

Helmed by lifelong Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence—who tackles King between rounds in the Panem prequel trenches via Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping—The Long Walk movie shrewdly updates the material. King first published the story in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, but it began flowing from his pen in 1966 when the writer was still a freshman at the University of Maine. It was further labored upon in the shadow of the draft for the Vietnam War, and all the mixed messages of flag-waving jingoism and cold, waiting caskets that accompanied it.

Lawrence’s film, with a screenplay by J.T. Mollner, is not nearly so angry as an adolescent author with friends condemned to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Still, there remains a ruthlessness that’s barely concealed beneath the asphalt surface of its setting, and a brutality which will likely stun audiences more accustomed to the dulled edges of Katniss’ PG-13 arrows.

There will be times you want to avert your gaze, but the easy watchability of the movie will leave you transfixed, even as teenage boys are summarily executed by an authoritarian government on live television and the film does not cut away. The title card is even delayed until the first murder of innocence occurs in graphic detail, and extreme close-up, around the 20-minute mark. Only when the stakes of “the game” feel explicitly real for the characters—not to mention the audience—does The Long Walk feel comfortable enough to announce itself. Anyone can be a winner, as a grizzled strongman unconvincingly promises the youth of America onscreen, but the game is still rigged against them all. One will win, but all will see their hopes, dreams, and probably their heads go bust.

Among the game’s moving targets is a quartet of heroes, anchored by Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), a high schooler with mysterious motives for willingly throwing his name into the lottery of becoming “a Walker.” But then, we’re told, every able-bodied young man in America signs up for the lottery, albeit Garraty seems like a particularly strange case. The lad barely conceals his long-dead father’s subversive thinking and activist notions against the authoritarian government which has taken over America. That regime, in turn, is represented by the Major (Mark Hamill), a military stuffed shirt without a last name. He commands the boys like an aging brosphere deity to walk indefinitely at three miles-per-hour or more, lest they be given a warning. If you stay below that threshold, you get a second warning, and then a third. After that you get “a ticket” at the end of a carbine.

Garraty’s chances are one in 50 since there is a boy representing every state in the union. Nonetheless, most of them seem to think they have pretty good odds, including the three pals Garraty makes along the way. There’s Art Baker (Tut Nyuot), a sweet, God-fearing boy from Baton Rouge; next is Hank Olson (Ben Wang), an amusing cross-section between the braggart and nerd that comes with every high school class; and finally remains Peter McVries (David Jonsson), another Southerner with enough charisma to convince strangers in a veritable Bataan Death March competition that they should become “the Four Musketeers.” (It’s still a King story, with all the occasional hamminess that can entail.)

We meet other youth as well who are defined by broad archetypal strokes before flashes of interiority, including an awkwardly toxic loner (Charlie Plummer), a fresh-faced innocent who seems young beneath his years (Roman Griffin Davis), and finally Garrett Wareing’s Stebbins, the extremely competitive athlete who cryptically knows too much about the Long Walk’s secrets and BTS history. All have stories to tell, and the most impressive thing about the film they’re in might be that it’s largely content to hear them out at length before their memories vanish in a red mist.

There are many ways one might approach this subject matter. The literary Long Walk’s narrative is fairly barebones; these characters walk, talk, reflect on life choices (including the doozy of doing their “patriotic duty” by signing up for this game), and then die. Sometimes by the dozens when the rain begins to fall on a particularly steep hill. Yet there’s a lyricism to the source material as well, and the bitter cynicism that informed so much of that era for the baby boomer generation.

Lawrence and Mollner largely opt for a stripped down and unfussy interpretation of the story. Much of the ambiguity that drives Garraty or McVries on the page is substituted by clear motivations on the screen, and a large chunk of their despair is replaced with a tone that skews closer to latter day King’s sentimentality. It becomes more of a story about the healing power of camaraderie and friendship as opposed to the folly (and systemic cruelty) of wasted youth. That distinction also leads to a bit of tonal chaos when the film reaches its revised ending.

What is never sacrificed, however, is the character-driven nature of the material. The movie is far more intense than anything associated with modern Young Adult fiction, and deliberately pensive and measured in spite of more commercial wrapping. Other than a handful concessions toward plot twists in the back-half, this remains a quiet character study about young men facing the enormity of mortality in a handful of days and hundreds of miles of agony.

It’s an actor’s piece, and a real showcase in particular for Jonsson who uses the lines on his face, whether while smiling or slowly dying, to infer entire epic sagas of lived experience. McVries is the guy none of his friends can take their eyes off, and neither will the audience. Which is fairly impressive since Hoffman carries over the strong case he began in Licorice Pizza that he might be every bit as talented as his late father.

Both performances and the ensemble at large carry this film more than any special effects or romantic triangles (in fact, what romantic subplots there are in the book are wholly excised). If there is a weak link, it is unfortunately Hamill. An underused character actor in a pop culture icon’s body, Hamill did solid work in another King adaptation this year, The Life of Chuck. However, his Major largely comes across like a cartoon closer to Hamill’s Joker in fatigues than a military man. There’s an uber-masculine bravado to the performance that feels in many ways modeled after the current occupant in the White House: a phony tough guy compensating for a gnawing inadequacy that can never be satiated. But it’s broad caricature, seemingly designed to give the Walkers a big black hat to rally against.

In this way, the handful of concessions to modern audience expectations—an easy villain to boo, obligatory third act reversals, and perhaps some generously long olive branches to those who buy into totalitarian systems—keep what is a good movie from becoming a great one. The Long Walk remains very good though, especially when it confronts general audiences with subversive ideas about living and dying with dignity beneath the flag of a fascist state. It’s even better though when it spends long stretches of its running time just asking us to enjoy the company of those we meet, and then leave, along the way.

The Long Walk is in theaters Friday, Sept. 12.