The Long Walk (2025)

	Directed by: Francis Lawrence	COUNTRY USA GENRE Dystopian survival thriller NORWEGIAN TITLE The Long Walk RUNNING TIME 108 minutes
	Produced by: Roy Lee Steven Schneider Francis Lawrence Cameron MacConomy
	Written by (based on the novel by Stephen King): JT Mollner

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Raymond "Ray" Garraty (#47)	Cooper Hoffman
Peter "Pete" McVries (#23)	David Jonsson
Billy Stebbins (#38)	Garrett Wareing	½
Arthur "Art" Baker	Tut Nyuot
Gary Barkovitch (#5)	Charlie Plummer
Hank Olson (#46)	Ben Wang
Richard Harkness (#49)	Jordan Gonzales	½
Collie Parker (#48)	Joshua Odjick
The Major	Mark Hamill
Thomas Curley (#7)	Roman Griffin Davis	-
Ginnie Garraty	Judy Greer	½
William Garraty	Josh Hamilton	-

Review

The Long Walk had been one of only a few among Stephen King's early novels, published in 1979 under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, not to be adapted to the screen. After a long pre-production stage involving several potential directors, here is the adaptation now, some 36 years later, directed by Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, The Hunger Games sequels). The concept feels a lot more familiar today than it would have done had George A. Romero gotten the project running in the late 1980s: In a relatively undescribed dystopian future, a totalitarian military leader named The Major (Mark Hamill) organises an annual event, The Long Walk, in which 50 young volunteers compete to see who can walk the farthest without stopping. If they walk too slow or are halted for any reason, including eating or relieving themselves, they are shot by the regime's death squads. The walker who lasts the longest wins fame and fortune.

Already from the outset, there are several elements not quite gelling in Lawrence's film. The dialogue written by JT Mollner as a substitute for the heavy use of internal monologue in King's book often feels forced and jejune, and combined with the wafer-thin supporting characters, the drama that unfolds within the group as they walk has an incessant sense of inauthenticity to it. With little or no backstory, the various characters' sudden outbursts and shifts into focus amount to little more than weak storytelling by Lawrence. And he does little to help his often hapless actors.

What's supposed to be a pulsing, tense dystopian warning with an uplifting undertone of humanism instead becomes a monotonous, savourless rehash of familiar survival elements, complete with an ending that is predictably uninspired in its unpredictability. As we join this group of young men, who are obviously too unfit for their task, and we get acquainted with their parodic oppressor, who has few other characteristics than Mark Hamill's gravelly voice, we're not transported to a dystopian society so much as to a Hollywood stumbling over itself.