The Long Walk (2025)
dir. Francis Lawrence
Rated: R
image: ©2025 Lionsgate
The Long Walk, the newest screen adaptation of a Stephen King novel, is enjoyable enough for its depiction of the harrowing conditions in which it places its characters, and for the excellent cast embodying them. But director Francis Lawrence’s latest effort feels like an imitator of the director’s own wildly popular Hunger Games franchise – itself based on the bestselling series written by Suzanne Collins – which is ironic, considering the source material for The Long Walk was published decades before Collins ever put pen to paper.
Director Gary Ross was at the helm for the first Hunger Games installment, but Lawrence took over directing duties for the remaining three films in the series, as well as the first prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. His adaptation of the second prequel novel, Sunrise on the Reaping, is currently in production and is set for a November 2026 release.
Lawrence embraces a stripped-down aesthetic for The Long Walk, especially in comparison to his work on the Hunger Games films. The Long Walk clocks in at a svelte 108 minutes, compared to the shortest of Lawrence’s films about the world of Katniss Everdeen, which runs at a hair over two hours. (Those movies keep getting longer and longer, with Songbirds & Snakes inching towards three hours.)
There are also no gifts from sponsors in The Long Walk, no forest landscape to provide a strategic advantage, no resistance movement using the game to bring down the sadistic regime overseeing it.
Here, the rules are simple: walk or die. In this dystopian version of the United States, the nation has become hopelessly impoverished in the aftermath of an unnamed devastating war. The ruling military regime has devised The Long Walk, an annual game in which fifty young men, one from each state, are selected to compete for unimaginable riches and the granting of one wish by the regime.
The walk starts on a Maine highway, and there is no finish line. If a contestant slows to below three miles an hour, he’s given a warning. After three warnings, he “gets his ticket,” which is a bullet in the head. If he steps off the pavement of the highway, he gets his ticket without warning. Walking three hours without a warning will wipe a contestant’s record back to zero. The game ends when there is only one contestant left.
A good friend of mine once described Stephen King villains as pure evil. King’s antagonists rarely possess shades of gray; they are cruel for the sake of cruelty, full stop. This tendency reveals itself in how often King uses broad archetypes as stand-ins for fully developed characters. The Long Walk, with an adaptation by screenwriter JT Mollner, is no exception.
King’s story gives us: the smartass, Gary Barkovitch (#5 – each young man is given a dog tag with his number to wear during the competition), who uses his devilish sense of humor to torment his fellow participants; the pragmatic hardass, Hank Olson (#46), who doesn’t take shit from anyone; the optimistic dreamer, Peter McVries (#23), who can find the silver lining on the darkest of clouds; and Ray Garraty (#47), our plucky hero. Because this is Stephen King, there’s also a writer in the bunch, who hopes to turn his experiences during The Long Walk into a book, assuming he can win.
The Master of Ceremonies for this twisted game is The Major, a high-ranking official in the regime (and possibly, the movie hints, the head of the military dictatorship) whose endless Sturm und Drang speeches to the contestants during the game are meant to inspire them, but have the opposite effect.
The movie also traffics in the Magical Negro trope as a function of its painfully transparent attempt at inclusive casting. (Please don’t confuse me here for someone like the odious Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who would be overjoyed for a return to all-white casts in movies and TV. While I’m all for racial equity on screen, the casting in The Long Walk feels overtly self-conscious and like it was agreed upon by executive committee. There’s a hilarious episode of the Apple TV+ series The Studio, Seth Rogan’s bonkers sendup of Hollywood, in which the heads of the fictional Continental Studios panic about how the racial casting of an upcoming blockbuster will be perceived by the public. They then go about making the worst possible decisions due to this concern.)
I read Stephen King’s The Long Walk when I was a teenager, which was too many decades ago now to count, so I can’t remember which race each character was ascribed in the novel, or if King mentioned the ethnic makeup of his characters at all. The casting of David Jonsson — a Black man — in the role of Pete McVries, opposite Cooper Hoffman — who is white — as our hero Ray, sets up Pete as the mystical dispenser of life-lessons, unbridled optimism, and spiritual, mental, and physical fortitude over the course of Ray’s ordeal.
Pete tells the other boys that, should he win, he’ll be completely altruistic with his wish, saying he would use it to improve the world in some way. This is in contrast to Ray, who fantasizes about wishing for the carbine assault rifle of one of the guards tasked with handing out tickets to disqualified contestants. He’ll use that rifle on The Major, he tells his fellow Long Walkers, as payback for a horrific event in Ray’s recent past.
Pete, who would be forgiven for harboring the same hate for the repressive regime as the other boys do, possesses within him an almost magical emotional detachment and a preternatural ability to see the bright side of life. He discourages Ray’s fantasy of unleashing violence on his enemy and confesses to his now closest friend that he couldn’t let someone else die in order to win, instead helping whoever he can to stay in the race. Pete also confesses to Ray that, should it come to that, he’ll simply sit down and accept his fate if and when he’s unable to keep going.
Without spoiling too much, I will admit that Lawrence and Mollner successfully subvert the stereotypical conclusion for a Magical Negro character by radically altering the end of King’s novel. Still, that doesn’t quite make up for the egregiousness of their use of the trappings of the trope up until the picture’s final minutes.
The fact that The Long Walk is such a sausage fest – the movie includes exactly one female character, Ray’s mom – makes the movie feel like it’s from another era. This is a direct result of the time in which the source material was written and the real-world circumstances that King was critiquing. Written during King’s early college days, in 1966-’67, The Long Walk was perceived during its initial publication as a fairly transparent analogy to the Viet Nam War and the draft imposed during that conflict, in which only men were called up to be fed into the meatgrinder of war.
David Jonsson (center) and Cooper Hoffman (far left) in a still from The Long Walk.
This surreal mixing of past and present goes beyond the subject matter and themes of the movie. Lawrence and his production design teams decided to craft a bespoke reality for their story that feels like it’s happening both now and in the past. Aside from slick smart watches that help the contestants keep track of their speed – and that rival the fanciest looking wearables currently available – the cars, clothes, and weaponry are all straight out of the Viet Nam era.
I personally believe this decision was made because having the Walkers wearing contemporary athleisure wear for the competition simply wouldn’t have been as visually compelling as having them all walk in blue jeans and THE MOST INSANE FOOTWEAR IMAGINABLE FOR SUCH A TASK.
It was surely a daunting task to make an interesting movie about a group of people walking. As Randal reminded us all in Clerks II, the Lord of the Rings trilogy was nothing more than three movies of a bunch of people walking, the height of boring. While I don’t agree with Randal’s juvenile assessment of LOTR, Lawrence must have had reservations about making the nuts and bolts of his film engaging.
Those reservations probably melted away when the cast of The Long Walk was finalized. Cooper Hoffman, as Ray Garraty, doesn’t deliver the delicate nuance we saw from him in his feature debut, Licorice Pizza, but that’s down to the material with which he’s working. Hoffman delivers in Ray a broken young man whose hate for the system that put him here is disguised by cool indifference.
David Jonsson, who was a bright spot in the otherwise lackluster and derivative Alien: Romulus, does his best with the no-bad-days, relentless positivity of Pete McVries. This guy is who the term “toxic positivity” was coined to describe. Still, the bond that Pete and Ray form over the course of the movie is touching, and much of that is down to Jonsson and Hoffman’s performances and chemistry. Mark Hamill brings a gruff menacing to the role of The Major. Hamill shines particularly in his voicework for animation, most notably in his turn as The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, and he crafts a gravely, pitiless vocal delivery for The Major.
Ultimately, The Long Walk feels anachronistic. Its 99% male cast, throwback visual aesthetic, and reliance on the Magical Negro trope makes the movie feel like it belongs in another era. Still, it’s entertaining enough, and the emotional catharsis of the climax is earned by the affection we build for the characters while watching them on their (not so) leisurely stroll.
Why it got 3 stars:
- Anybody who’s known me since high school knows that I was Stephen King’s A#1 fan when I was a kid. Then I got older and I had a desire to think more deeply about why I liked something, not simply that an artist I liked was making it. The flaws in the original story and some baffling new choices by the filmmakers cause The Long Walk to be uneven, but not without its charms.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The Major’s speech about the “epidemic of laziness” in the country, and how the game is a remedy for that problem, sounds so much like Republican politicians shaming and blaming all of our real-world ills on 20-somethings playing video games in their parents’ basement that it hurts.
- It could be mostly down to the source material, but it feels like a conscious effort on Lawrence’s part to include as many curse words as possible to get that “R” rating, unlike the Hunger Games films. Because we all know it’s perfectly safe for teenagers to see horrifying violence in movies, but we must protect their precious ears from the naughty words.
- The pop song with lyrics that tie into the movie from a star musician — in this case, Shaboozey — that plays over the closing credits and is typically only included to boost the sales of the soundtrack album feels so 1994. I realize that it’s still happening, specifically with the Hunger Games movies, but it definitely feels like a Hollywood phenomenon that’s time has passed. It was fine for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but let’s let it go.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- The Long Walk is still available in some theaters, but I caught up with it on VOD. In addition to the dwindling big screen options, The Long Walk is currently available for rent or purchase — currently at a premium price point — on most VOD platforms.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
I have a short one for you today. Donald Trump is now retweeting calls to hang Democratic lawmakers. This is not normal. None of this is normal.