Technically Steven King’s first novel, though published much later and under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Long Walk was inspired by the misery of the Vietnam War. Set in an alternate American dystopia, it involves a voluntary lottery system that funnels young men into the titular Walk, an annual, Sisyphean contest in which they walk continuously and must maintain a constant pace or face summary execution. The last guy standing is granted a single wish. The novel was a particularly bleak work, one that summarized a lot of what King quite correctly saw as the futility and cruelty of the conflict and the draft that helped fuel it.
Now, some forty-plus years after its publication, the novel has finally become a film after many failed attempts and false starts. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk is largely a faithful adaptation in a broad sense, although it necessarily streamlines some events and amalgamates characters. What’s missing — and what crucially defangs the entire affair — is the absence of King’s prose to help situate the audience within the characters’ psychic spaces. Now all we have is dialogue to help guide us into the true madness and fatigue that eventually consumes these kids (before the bullets to the head, that is).
In a change from the novel, the film’s focus is placed more squarely on the relationship between two of the contestants, Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson). Garraty is a hometown hero of sorts, as he’s from the town that’s the starting point for the contest. He ultimately has an ulterior motive for joining the Walk, one that, when revealed, is too boring to register as anything more than patently silly. He strikes up a friendship with McVries, who is strikingly optimistic given their circumstances. And in this, we find one of the film’s most glaring problems: all these kids are facing near-certain death, and have allegedly been living under fascism for their entire lives (we’re told this is the 19th year of the Walk), and yet they comport themselves like innocents, naïvely surprised when one of them is blown away for tripping or slowing down. At one point, after a Walk participant gets killed, Garraty screams, “This is so fucked up!” as if he’s not there by choice and didn’t understand the circumstances. This leaves the characters to register as unpersuasive victims, while the premise is ultimately nonsensical as public bloodsport (why this is happening is mostly unclear — we are made to understand that it’s good for the economy somehow). High-concept dystopian narratives need to be much tighter than this in order to actually muster the kind of power to which the present brutality tries to act as a shortcut.
That said, the young actors all do what they can with what little of King’s narrative made it to the script’s pages, offering a few flashes of personality that keep things superficially compelling. But all of them are overshadowed by Mark Hamill as The Major, who oversees the contest and mostly barks fascist platitudes. It’s not much of a performance exactly, but it’s the only amusingly novel thing that Lawrence’s film delivers. But The Long Walk is a plot-driven project, which mostly means that slowly, monotonously, all of the boys are shot in the head or blown away for one reason or another, which ceases to be shocking or tragic almost immediately. Then, when it’s over, it’s just… sad, exactly like you knew it would be. There’s nothing wrong with something like this being bleak, or even outright depressing in its timeliness, but like most bleak and depressingly timely films, The Long Walk also lands as a massive so what. There’s simply nothing to take away from this beyond empty, chilly air.
DIRECTOR: Francis Lawrence; CAST: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonnson, Charlie Plummer, Garrett Wareing; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: September 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.
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