Joshua Odjick as Parker, Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness, David Jonsson as McVries, Cooper Hoffman as Garraty, and Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close/Lionsgate
The task is simple: walk or die. One winner. No finish line. Legendary author Stephen King has seen his novels adapted into some of the greatest movies ever made, from The Shining to The Shawshank Redemption to Misery. It’s a miracle that it’s taken this long for a movie adaptation of King’s first novel he ever wrote. While Carrie was his first published novel, King started writing The Long Walk during his freshman year of college. A dystopian novel of this quality at that age is marvelous, and it deserves an adaptation this good.
The Long Walk is a perfect movie. I don’t say that very often about new films, but as I watched this, I realized I didn’t have a single thing I would change about it. No notes. Go see it. That’s the review. Thanks for reading.
Okay, I can elaborate. The Long Walk is a brutal, harrowing thriller that will shake you to your core. It’s a very fast-paced movie. We begin with young Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) saying goodbye to his mother, played by Judy Greer. Greer doesn’t have a lot of screen time in this movie, but in her brief moments, she leaves a very lasting impression. She’s so broken about seeing her son enter this competition, and it shows how tragic this is. The young men in this contest volunteer for it in the hopes of winning money and escaping their poverty. They’re driven in a similar fashion to the characters in Squid Game, and this movie feels like a stripped-down take on that premise.
Decades before Squid Game brought life-or-death stakes to childhood games with the promise of unimaginable riches, King wrote a novel where our characters had to do something as easy as walking. Mark Hamill plays The Major, proving once again that he can play villains just as well as he can play iconic heroes like Luke Skywalker. This is Hamill’s second appearance in a King adaptation this year after The Life of Chuck, and he brings such an interesting flavor to this villain. He’s a talented voice actor, and he combines doing a different voice with a menacing live-action performance.
The Major breaks down the rules for our characters. They have to maintain a speed of at least 3 miles per hour. If they go under, they get three warnings before they suffer fatal consequences. We learn a bit about a few characters, including Peter McVries (David Jonsson) and Hank Olson (Ben Wang). And then we’re off. The characters begin walking very early on, and from there, we have a premise rooted in never-ending tension. This movie is non-stop suspense because our characters never get a chance to slow down in a very literal sense. It’s haunting and absolutely riveting.
The Long Walk is wholly unique in that regard. Even Squid Game and The Hunger Games have our game scenes and our dialogue scenes. With this movie, the game never ends. The characters are constantly in danger of losing. When the first player ultimately loses, director Francis Lawrence depicts it in horrifyingly bloody fashion. Lawrence is no stranger to dystopian fare, having previously directed every movie in The Hunger Games series except the first one. Here, he’s unrestrained by the PG-13 rating. Sometimes, when a movie is free to be rated R, it’s good because we get to have more awesome, fun violence. Nothing about the violence in The Long Walk is fun; it’s stomach-churning.
It’s an excellent choice from Lawrence because many other directors would cut away right before the shot is fired, and we’d hear it ring in the distance. By having the audience watch as very young men get their faces blown off in graphic detail, we have a front row seat to the nightmare of this situation. Everyone volunteered to be in this contest, but once people begin to die, something changes, and the reality of this situation sets in.
There’s a significant emotional toll that this movie takes, not only on the characters in the situation but on the audience. You often feel like you’re walking with them because the movie rarely ever cuts away to anything else. There are no subplots here; just one plot of a group of people trying to stay alive. King and screenwriter JT Mollner, who previously made last year’s Strange Darling, make this both hard to watch and an experience you can’t look away from.
With its unflinching nature, The Long Walk is one of the best dystopian movies of all time and one of the greatest Stephen King movies ever made. What makes it even better is that you grow attached to the characters. Hoffman has had some good roles in Licorice Pizza and Saturday Night, but this may be his best role. I liked Jonsson in Alien: Romulus as well, but he floored me here. He’s so charming and charismatic, and he manages to have a positive outlook on life. He’s a ray of light in a movie that’s so grounded in sadness. This movie can be really bleak, but the conversations shared between Ray and David are really thought-provoking.
We almost wish that the characters weren’t so damn likable because with a premise like this, many characters are going to die. Death is inevitable, and the fact that they rope us in by getting us to like some characters makes their eventual deaths so much more gut-wrenching. Even some more antagonistic characters, whom we’re not supposed to like very much, we still have mixed feelings about the idea of them dying when it becomes a real possibility. We see these people try to keep up their morale and all of their best and worst moments.
The friendship between Ray and David feels like what we saw out of Andy and Red in The Shawshank Redemption. They’re two very different people who are trapped in a terrible situation, but in the darkest of places, they manage to see the light in each other. You wish they weren’t in this situation because they would be lifelong friends outside of this. But as the Major says at the beginning, there can only be one winner. This is a tear-jerking, emotional experience. It’s unforgettable in the best way, and the ending will leave you breathless. The Long Walk asks what it means to win when winning costs everything, and it’s a question you’ll be thinking about long after you reach the finish line.
SCORE: 10/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 10 equates to “Masterpiece.” This is the rare release that transcends genre and must be experienced by all fans of the medium.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our The Long Walk review.
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