Producers: Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Francis Lawrence and Cameron MacConomy Director: Francis Lawrence Screenplay: JT Mollner Cast: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Jordan Gonzalez, Joshua Odjick, Jordan Gonzalez, Noah de Mel, Daymon Wrightly, Jack Giffin, Thamela Mpumlwana, Keenan Lehmann, Dale Neri, Teagan Stark, Sam Clark, Emmanuel Oderemi, Josh Hamilton, Judy Greer and Mark Hamill Distributor: Lionsgate
Grade: C
Stephen King wrote “The Long Walk,” his first completed novel, when he was a freshman at the University of Maine in 1966-67 (it remained unpublished until it appeared under his pen name of Richard Bachman in 1979). Even as substantially altered by screenwriter JT Mollner, it feels like a young man’s work, garrulous and pretentious, and as dramatized by director Francis Lawrence (whose work on all “The Hunger Games” movies except the first apparently made him a natural choice for another cruel-competition movie) it proves a tedious slog in more ways than one.
The film retains the basic premise of the book. In a dystopian U.S.A. mired in economic depression following some sort of civil conflict, the authoritarian regime headed by a brutish figure called The Major (Mark Hamill, apparently trying to channel Ron Perlman and not succeeding) has contrived a sadistic but supposedly morale-building annual challenge with promises of big money and a wish come true. Fifty young men are chosen by lottery, one from each state, to make The Long Walk—a grueling trek over more than three hundred miles that will naturally weed out the weaker ones as the entrants trudge on, often past onlookers. Some will go mad, others collapse and die.
But the regime has established rules that will reduce the number more efficiently. It mandates that each man maintain a pace of three miles an hour, and failure to do so for more than half a minute results in a warning from soldiers following in armored vehicles; when a walker fails to respond to a third such warning, he’s simply shot in the head. The last man walking will receive a large cash prize and anything else he cares to name.
Given that King was a young college student facing the possibility of the draft when he wrote “The Long Walk,” it’s inevitable that the story has been taken as a metaphor for the Vietnam War and the senseless brutality it inflicted on young draftees. Now that context has faded in the national memory, so Mollner and Lawrence present it simply as a timeless example of the cruelty of authoritarianism. That’s evident in the motivation they provide for the contestant who’s the focus of the narrative, Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman). He’s the only one of the walkers provided with a backstory of any consequence, shown in a few flashbacks. The book had him dreaming of a girlfriend, but that’s jettisoned here, replaced by anger over the regime’s summary execution of his father (Josh Hamilton), a dissident of sorts, and by a desire for vengeance. It’s a change that alters the character substantially from the book, although Ray still comes across as an inherently good fellow whose instincts toward his fellow travelers are basically supportive, even though any success they have will ultimately come at his expense.
Change is also notable in the character of Peter McVries (David Jonsson), who in the book is portrayed as sarcastic and often cruel, but here has become an almost saintly black man, encouraging Ray repeatedly to redouble his efforts and stay the course. Their camaraderie and conversation become the centerpiece of “The Long Walk,” and the much changed denouement shows the powerful effect their time together has had.
But, of course, some of the other men play significant roles, though like Garraty and McVries more as types than rounded characters. There’s Curly (Roman Griffin Davis), for example, the kid who lied about his age to get into the competition. And caustic, determined Olson (Ben Wang), whom Garraty and McVries try to bond with, along with nasty, malicious Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), who’s ostracized for his smug contempt toward everyone else though at one point even he demonstrates a glimmer of humanity beneath the surface. There’s also studied, observant Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), who keeps himself at an emotional distance but is harboring a secret he’ll reveal as the march nears its end. Many others are part of the pack as well, but they’re even less well defined, memorable only for the moments when their bodies or minds give out and Lawrence, cinematographer Joe Willems (working with a brutally bleak color palette) and editor Mark Yoshikawa can stage another gruesome death or execution.
All the young men in the cast do what they can delivering dialogue that varies from the ordinary-guy banter King has always specialized in to the pseudo-poetic excurses he too often indulges in (Mollner wisely excises most of the literary references he inserted in the novel), and they all look convincingly haggard; Hoffman and Jonsson stand out, of course, and both are perfectly fine if hardly extraordinary, but among the others it’s Plummer most will remember as the mean-spirited semi-villain of the bunch. Except for the unconvincing Hamill, the older actors have little to do, with Hamilton getting little more than a single-scene cameo and Judy Greer, as Ray’s concerned mother, not much more. Thanks to Nicolas Lepage’s production design and Heather Neale’s costumes as well as Willem’s camerawork, all are set against a background that’s unremittingly bleak, the mood accentuated by Jeremiah Fraites’ sunless score.
One can analyze “The Long Walk” as a depiction of the old saw that life’s a bitch and then you die, or in a slightly more hopeful vein, as testimony to the fact that vestiges of humanity survive even in a world so brutal as the one the film depicts. One thing you can say with certainty: as staged by Lawrence and edited by Yoshikawa, it feels much longer than its 108 minutes.
More debatable, one hopes, is the story’s implicit assumption that most people find entertainment in watching contests in which death will inevitably claim so many participants. The success of Lawrence’s “Hunger” films (or things like “Squid Game”) suggests that many do, at least when there’s plenty of action and excitement involved in the players’ efforts to avoid a grisly fate. This one, in which the game is, if you’ll pardon the pun, much more pedestrian and the players mere hapless drones, will test the thesis to the utmost.