The Long Walk (2025) ***

     The Long Walk was the second of five uncharacteristically short novels that Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1984, before an enterprising journalist discovered the link between the two personas the following year. It concerns a grisly and disturbingly pointless competition in which 100 teenaged boys march south across New England from the Canadian border until 99 of them have either dropped from exhaustion or been executed for this or that violation of the rules by the game’s military referees. Although The Long Walk debuted before the public in 1979, it was actually written over a decade earlier, during King’s freshman year of college, and it unsurprisingly invites interpretation as a sidelong Vietnam allegory. On its face, that would seem to make it a strange choice for film adaptation in 2025, since ’Nam is very much a dead subtext nowadays. If there’s one thing you can count on from the United States of America, though, it’s an infinite ingenuity at inventing new meat grinders to feed with the bodies, minds, and futures of the nation’s youth.

     One of the stranger things about the novel, marking it as the work of a novice writer, is that it’s set for no discernable reason in a parallel timeline as well as a dystopian near future. The movie does something similar, giving us an America in the aftermath of a catastrophic war, where 1967 and 1979 seem to be happening simultaneously. This alternate America is a fascist dictatorship ruled by an enigmatic strongman known only as “the Major” (Mark Hamill, from The Star Wars Holiday Special and Body Bags), who in the manner of all really successful authoritarian leaders is widely beloved by his subjects despite the cruelty and oppression of his regime. In the film’s clearest and most astute bit of updating for the present era, it appears that one key to the Major’s popularity is his skill at playing to the older generations’ prejudices against those younger than themselves. The country’s continuing economic woes are not the result of devastation, depopulation, and disruption inflicted during the war, he says, but stem rather from an epidemic of simple laziness among Americans of prime working age. But the Major cannily exploits generational resentment from the other direction as well, giving the nation’s teen boys a chance to show up their supposedly shiftless elders. Every fall, each of the 50 states selects a single volunteer of high school age to take part in the Long Walk, the ultimate expression of go-getting, gumption, and competitive spirit. (The movie makes a host of small, fiddly changes to the rules, but the contest’s march-or-die upshot remains the same.) Of course, this isn’t ancient Greece, so the government has to offer some incentives more tangible than honor and glory in order to entice a sufficient number of kids into walking themselves to death year after year. Long Walk victors receive not only a life-alteringly huge monetary award, but also the granting of a single wish. The latter can be literally anything, subject only to the government’s power to grant it— and to the stipulation that it can’t bring about any change to the established social or political order.

     Our focus among this year’s contestants is first and foremost on the walker from Maine, Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman). As in the book, Ray is the son of a dissident (Josh Hamilton, of Dark Skies) who was done away with by the Major’s military police. But whereas King’s Garraty started off lacking even the most rudimentary political consciousness despite his parentage, this version believes that he’s found a way to use his one wish to bring down the system, regardless of the official prohibition on such things. You might expect a boy on a mission like that to be ruthlessly singleminded about winning, but in fact Ray hasn’t even reached the starting line before he begins making friends with some of his opponents. Peter McVries (David Jonsson, from Alien: Romulus), an intermittently homeless orphan with an attention-grabbing facial scar, is more or less on the same page as Ray with regard to paying his winnings forward (although his idea of what that means is substantially less grandiose). Art Baker (Tut Nyuot), the walker from Louisiana, has no thought for anything but the money, having spent the whole of his short life in grinding rural poverty. And Hank Olson (Be Wang) resembles the novel’s Garraty insofar as he can offer no clear accounting of his reasons for applying to enter the Long Walk beyond some nebulous sense that he was just kind of supposed to. Throughout the contest, these Four Musketeers, as they dub themselves, will do whatever they can within the compass of the rules to protect one another from the hazards of the Long Walk, even though every minute the other three survive means another 60 seconds for all of them to keep walking.

     There are two further boys outside the Musketeers toward whom The Long Walk directs sustained attention. One of them is a loudmouthed jerk called Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer, from The Clovehitch Killer and The Return) who wins the white-hot enmity of all the other walkers when he taunts one of their number into getting himself shot by the referees. The other is a dauntingly superb physical specimen by the name of Stebbins (Garrett Wareing, of Independence Day: Resurgence and Dead Sea) who possesses an encyclopedic mastery of Long Walk lore. Stebbins is the nearest thing Garraty has to a personal rival, for he too has a closely guarded motivation for staking his life on this vicious contest, and his nature as a seemingly tireless human dynamo makes him the obvious favorite to win if you’re the gambling type. In point of fact, the book did ultimately come down to a battle of attrition between Garraty and Stebbins— but don’t get too attached to anything you might have read, even though perhaps four fifths of the movie’s dialogue was lifted right off of the page. None of these kids are quite the people they were in the novel, and screenwriter J.T. Mollner is setting up a finale very different from King’s.

     Francis Lawrence, who directed The Long Walk, also directed all three sequels to The Hunger Games. That’s an important piece of context, although I can find no smoking gun to prove that helming those movies a decade ago won Lawrence the gig to make this one. The core premises alone suffice to put the two projects in conversation with each other, and the parallels become all the stronger thanks to Mollner’s decision to give one of the walkers revolutionary aspirations. But what a difference the intervening ten years make in how Lawrence portrays the idea of teenagers taking on tyranny! True, there was a lot of cynicism in the Hunger Games sequels, especially with regard to the power of authoritarian regimes to mold their subjects’ perception of reality. Nevertheless, there was just as much optimism about the common people’s capacity to want better than they’d been given, to identify correctly the forces standing in the way of them getting it, and to make the sacrifices necessary to overthrow a corrupt system once they were roused to action. There were also assumptions implicit throughout the entire tetralogy that it takes a gifted political operator to impose and to maintain a dictatorship like that of President Snow, and that tyranny would be truly popular only among those who benefited from it materially in direct and obvious ways. The Long Walk suggests a much bleaker assessment of all those issues, and depending on how you interpret its final moments (I see them as a subjective and unreliable Sid & Nancy ending), it might offer very little in the way of reassurance that anyone with the courage and creativity to strike a meaningful blow against such a system could live to enjoy the more humane one that follows its downfall. It seems to me that’s only fitting for a retelling of this story in an era when American fascism is an undeniable fact of life, rather than a mere disquieting thought experiment.

     When I re-read The Long Walk in preparation for this review, it struck me that the book had more in common than I’d previously realized with The Body, King’s similarly long-unpublished novella about a quartet of boys trekking across the countryside in search of a kid from a neighboring community who’d been run down by a train. In both cases, external action takes a back seat to what the lads learn about themselves, each other, and life in general on their quest to look death in the face. Lawrence and Mollner took that similarity strongly to heart, so that their Long Walk becomes something very much like a dystopian Stand by Me. I’ve never seen a We Have Seen the Future, and It Sucks movie do anything like that before. That’s a major selling point for me, even if I can see how The Long Walk would leave the usual audience for such pictures thoroughly nonplussed. Indeed, I think this film’s coming-of-age drama approach is a significant part of its power, because if I’ve learned anything about life under dystopian conditions these past ten years or so, it’s that the ordinary business of living stubbornly and surreally insists on continuing, no matter how terrifyingly fucked the circumstances surrounding and overshadowing it become. That’s exactly what we see here, as 50 teens who all understand that 49 of them have effectively volunteered for slaughter go on putting one foot in front of the other, chatting about their now-irrelevant pasts, forming shifting cliques and alliances, and busting each other’s balls over stupid shit, as if the Long Walk were just an atypically strenuous Boy Scout camping trip.

     All that being the case, it’s vitally important that the half-dozen or so featured walkers be played by actors who can convincingly and effectively bounce character studies off of each other for a little under two hours. Fortunately, this bunch mostly can. Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, and Charlie Plummer especially mark themselves as actors to watch for in the future. The former two trade off carrying most of the movie’s weight, and their success is all the more remarkable for the lack of sustained conventional conflict, either between their characters individually, or between the two of them and any external enemy who can be fought or resisted under the terms of the story. It was Plummer, though, who leapt out at me, because the movie’s take on Barkovitch is considerably more challenging a role than the simple sadistic sociopath from the book. Don’t get me wrong— this Barkovitch is still a creep. But Lawrence and Mollner’s interpretation is also pitiable in a way that King’s never was, because he lacks the original’s nakedly evil motivation for walking. Movie Barkovitch is just one more kid who made a lethally stupid error of judgment, and his consistently assholish behavior throughout the Long Walk usually looks rooted more in low emotional intelligence than in premeditated cruelty.

     The only serious weak link among the walkers is Garrett Wareing as Stebbins— and his inadequacies are as much Mollner’s fault as the actor’s. Like all of his fellow competitors, Stebbins on film is a shuffled composite of his namesake from the book and several other figures who got dropped for the sake of a manageably-sized cast. But in contrast to the Four Musketeers, Stebbins suffers noticeably from the recombination. The original characters making him up mix like water, oil, and mercury, and the changes to the final act leave the new Stebbins without a clear narrative or thematic function. It would take a performer of rare talent to make much sense of the part.

     I’m somewhat conflicted, too, on what Lawrence and Mollner have done with the Major. On the one hand, it was a canny move to make him an incessant spouter of arrant nonsense vaguely flattering to insecure male egos, rather than the inscrutable Big Brother analogue from the novel. This way, we can see without having to be shown directly what the rest of the Major’s governance is like, and we can recognize with a weary sigh the basis of his appeal to his followers. Mark Hamill was smart, too, to play him as a special kind of phony, not half the arrogant, blustering boob that he poses as whenever there’s a crowd looking on. This is a fascist with staying power, who has both the showman’s instinct for giving a debased people what they crave in a leader, and the cunning to be pragmatically ruthless where it counts. But at the same time, I think we see a little too much of him, playing too hands-on a role in the administration of his tyranny. Most significantly, I don’t buy for a second that the Major would lead his secret police death squads in person, pulling the trigger on defiant dissidents with his own finger. In a movie that otherwise exhibits such sharp perception of how an authoritarian regime works (or could work) within American culture, it’s a strangely clumsy misstep.

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