The Long Walk

I’ll never complain about doing cardio ever again after watching this one.

The latest attempt to adapt yet another Stephen King story to the big screen, The Long Walk posits what would happen if fifty boys, each plucked from a different state, competed in an elimination-esque trial that forces them to walk until they quite literally can’t anymore. A cruel game used to “inspire” the masses (read: to keep the population scared and complacent), The Long Walk mainly centers on Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and Pete McVries (David Jonsson), two complete strangers who learn to rely on each other during the most harrowing event of their lives. Promised money, fame, and a single wish granted no matter the ask, Ray, Pete, and the forty-eight other boys push themselves to the breaking point as they are closely observed and tracked by a military contingent led by the Major (Mark Hamill), the flesh-and-blood incarnation of everything wrong with this marathon walk, as well as the man responsible for putting an end to players’ lives should they fall below a pre-set walking speed. And as players begin to drop like flies the longer the competition drags on, Ray and Pete realize that they’ll need to overcome their physical and mental limits to have any chance of winning, something that’s far easier said than done.

Though I’m a huge fan of King’s work in general, I’ve only ever read one or two of his Richard Bachman books (a pseudonym he used for a time), with the story this film is based on not being one of them. Basically a walking simulator turned up to eleven with permadeath active at all times, The Long Walk does a lot of things right, mostly thanks to a halfway decent script and director Francis Lawrence’s knack for adapting young adult novels to the big screen in a consistently great manner — he directed all but the first The Hunger Games films, after all.

Constantly forced to shoot scenes on the move since the entire cast can’t stop walking for longer than a few seconds at a time (lest they want a bullet to the brain, that is), the expected repetitive nature of The Long Walk’s story oddly became its greatest strength, making the film feel far more intriguing and fresh for longer than it had any right to. Throw in some trademark Stephen King violence, a rough-and-tough performance by Mark Hamill, and some genuinely great acting from its two leads, and The Long Walk easily becomes one of the better King adaptations around.

Unfortunately, for all the good this film does, my experience took a hard turn during the final stretch of the film. Like a gymnast who ends up tanking their decent run after a particularly messy landing, the final ten minutes or so felt completely divorced from the rest of the film in a way I didn’t like. Maybe it was the weird “fake-out” ending, or how things built up in a super anticlimactic way that I hadn’t anticipated, or simply because the filmmakers changed the original ending to something I assume wasn’t as good, but by the time I (long) walked out of the theater, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little deflated at how the film limped to the finish line.

I was on board with The Long Walk for almost its entire runtime, so if you want to know whether I liked it or not, the answer is a firm yes, with an asterisk attached noting how the last ten minutes don’t count towards that statement. That said, what this movie does get right, i.e., its character relationships, visceral and heartbreaking violence, and constant momentum felt in its pacing and plotting, it does surprisingly well. And while it most definitely stumbles from time to time thanks to a finale I simply didn’t care for, The Long Walk is a successful Stephen King adaptation, and is absolutely a movie I’d recommend for fans looking for something competent yet ultimately flawed.