Review: The Long Walk (2025)

 The Long Walk (2025)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, suicide, pervasive language, and sexual references

Score: 4 out of 5

While The Long Walk is based on a novel by Stephen King, specifically one that he published under the Richard Bachman pen name, it's not quite a horror movie... not quite. Rather, it's King's prototypical take on young-adult dystopian fiction decades before The Hunger Games popularized the genre -- right down to the fact that they got Francis Lawrence, the director of the Hunger Games sequels, to handle its film adaptation and put his name on the marketing almost as much as King's. And writing as he was long before Suzanne Collins, or even Lois Lowry (arguably the grandmother of the genre with The Giver), King was free to do his own thing with it and give it his usual Stephen King touch, crafting a moody, brutal, unglamorous, and philosophical tale about authoritarianism and the inevitability of death that, because he was writing for an adult audience, pulled no punches in its graphic depictions of what happens along the long road its characters are forced to walk. This is more or less a faithful adaptation of the book, changing some things here and there both big and small but otherwise hewing closely to the source material, and while I'd hardly call it an action-packed thrill ride, given the premise that was never really in the cards. No, where this movie shines is in putting you in the metaphorical shoes of its characters and slowly wearing you down right along with them. This is a tough ride, but it is a rewarding one, a character-focused and atmospheric story of resilience in the face of adversity and tyranny that, much like its characters, never races ahead to its destination but never once stops when it gets moving. It's a hell of a movie that hits like a sack of bricks, and one I'd eagerly recommend if you don't mind feeling like shit afterwards.

The setting is a dystopian United States that's been ruled by a military regime ever since the end of "the war" nineteen years ago, the exact year never stated but the technology and culture on display implying that it's a world where the '70s never ended and just kept getting worse. (In the book, the war was strongly implied to be an alternate World War II that lasted into the '50s and ended in a stalemate once both the US and Germany had nuclear weapons, but here, it's kept ambiguous what it was.) To raise morale and instill in the youth a solid work ethic, every year the government stages the Long Walk, a contest where one boy from each state is selected to walk at an even pace of at least three miles an hour without stopping. If you fall below that speed, then, after three warnings, you are eliminated via a bullet to the head. Any other violations of the rules (don't leave the predetermined path, don't physically attack your competitors or the soldiers overseeing the walk) are likewise met with summary execution. It sounds easy at first, until you realize that there is no finish line; the Walk goes on for days until only one competitor is still standing, whereupon he will be awarded a large cash prize and anything he wishes for. The Walk is entirely voluntary, but in an impoverished nation where many people are struggling to get by, most boys enter their names into the lottery to be selected for the Walk simply because they see the remote chance of winning it as their only hope for a better life.

The film's protagonist Raymond "Ray" Garraty is one such competitor, a teenage boy from Freeport, Maine who entered the contest over his mother's objections and, as the film goes on, turns out to have had an ulterior motive for doing so. He's surrounded by a bunch of other boys from all over the country, but the central arc of the film mainly concerns his growing friendship with one of his competitors, Peter McVries, who entered for the same reason most boys do. Their bromance is the film's main dramatic throughline, and it would not have worked without the performances of Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson. Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour -- speaking of Hunger Games connections) makes Ray come across as an almost stereotypical "all-American" blue-collar boy on the surface but one who has plenty of secrets and layers beneath that, one where you can tell he's keeping some of them close to his chest for his own protection if nothing else. There's a darkness behind his boyish good looks, but not the evil kind; rather, it's that of a kid who's grown up way too fast and seen way too much in his short life. Jonsson's Peter, meanwhile, is an idealist who wants to use his prize to help people, a guy who, like many of the guys in the Walk, doesn't seem to realize the gravity of what it actually involves until the first competitor is violently eliminated. As the film goes on, he winds up spiritually worn down by the Walk the way everybody is physically, especially once he and his new friend Ray are forced to confront the terrible truth that they spend the entire film trying to ignore: that only one person can survive the Walk, meaning that their friendship was always doomed. This fact looms over every interaction the characters have, and some of the less scrupulous among them, such as the trademark Stephen King douchebag Gary Barkovitch, use it to try and psych their competitors out and get them to trip up and get themselves eliminated. After all, when only one of you gets to live, the old reality TV adage "I'm not here to make friends" becomes that much more salient... right?

Which is exactly what the system wants, of course. At one point, the characters bring up the possibility of having more than one winner, so as to give incentive for characters to team up and help each other out, possibly betray each other, and create drama for the viewers at home. It's a question that hangs over a lot of dystopian "death game" stories I've seen and read, and while this film never explicitly answers it, it otherwise does all it can to imply it: the Walk is a show of force on the part of a blustering, blowhard government. The Hunger Games made this an explicit part of the text, but here, even with a comparatively more humane death game (for starters, it's purely voluntary), the film does all it can to imply that the government created the Walk as a tool of oppression. And nowhere is this clearer than with the Major, the slimy sack of shit who looms over the Walk. A gruff military man who feels like if Coriolanus Snow or Caesar Flickerman had been played by R. Lee Ermey, he exists outside the actual Walk, carried like the rest of the soldiers in a military vehicle, but still looks down on it, watching over the contestants like a hawk and taking pleasure in their suffering. Everything we learn about him is designed to make you hate him that much more, especially once we find that he and one of the contestants have history that he certainly had to have known about the moment he saw everyone gathered at the starting line. Mark Hamill has always been a far more versatile actor than most people give him credit for (though nerds like myself know better), and here, I barely recognized him as the same guy who played the heroic Luke Skywalker or the laughing-mad Joker. Even with a fairly limited presence, he was still a loathsome jackass who I wanted to see get his comeuppance, the closest thing this movie has to a real human villain beyond just the system as a whole.

Francis Lawrence's direction gives this movie a suffocating atmosphere, one that had me feeling cramps in my feet and legs as though I'd been walking right alongside the characters even though I was watching from a comfortable reclining chair in a movie theater. The setting feels retro, like the sort of film adaptation of the novel that might have been made in the '80s at the height of that decade's dystopian sci-fi boom, and this extends to the pacing as well. There really aren't many big, exciting action set pieces in this film, barring one scene where the competitors have to walk uphill that quickly degenerates into a madhouse as they're worn down. We see signs throughout the film that people are watching the Walk on television, but given how this movie places viewers firmly in Ray's shoes throughout, such pomp and circumstance is something that only exists from far away and feels almost like it's mocking the competitors. The gore is decidedly deglamorized and realistic in ways that feel gross and feel like they were meant to be gross. To borrow an old cliché but one that's rarely been more applicable than it is here, this is a movie about the journey, not the destination... the long, painful, weary death march that you know isn't gonna end well for anyone, not even the winner. This is the kind of thriller where the thrills come in slow, but build up as the film goes on until, by the end, you really do feel like you've survived something grueling.

The Bottom Line

The Long Walk is an intense, gritty, slow-burn survival story that's not for everyone, and can at times feel a bit too dry, but definitely has plenty to offer those who are up for one hell of a ride. A firm recommendation in the pantheon of dystopian science fiction.