If you like your dystopian scenarios lean and extremely mean, then look no further than this Stephen King adaptation, which is surely one of the grimmest mainstream movies we’ve had for some time. The blunt premise is custom built for death and suffering: 50 young American men are selected by lottery for an annual marathon march. If any walker slows to less than three miles per hour, or strays off the road, they are removed from the competition – by being shot in the head at point-blank range. The final survivor wins whatever they want, they’re promised.
Why these men would volunteer for a competition with such unfavourable odds we’re left to wonder, as the broader authoritarian society in which the story is set – which looks a lot like 1960s America – is barely seen or explained. It’s clear who we’re rooting for though: Cooper Hoffman’s Ray Garraty, who is dropped off at the starting line by his tearful mother (Judy Greer), then it’s off to the races. Garraty is an all-round decent soul, who befriends and encourages his fellow competitors, particularly Pete, played by British actor David Jonsson (who’s come a long way from Rye Lane). Their growing friendship is the film’s heart, and both actors are innately charming and natural, though both have deeper, darker histories and motivations to reveal.
The vibe is initially reminiscent of Stand By Me, another King story about young men bonding on the road: bantering, sharing stories, chatting about nothing and everything. There are some entertaining supporting characters: spiky, bullying Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer) and cocky but vulnerable Olson (Ben Wang) in particular. At its best, the story slots into an easy rhythm, though the camaraderie is destined not to last, as the tiring pack is routinely winnowed down by the accompanying military (led by a cartoonishly shouty commander played by Mark Hamill), and almost every horrific head shot is rendered in full, blood-spurting detail.
King wrote this story in 1967, when it doubtless resonated with the random, pointless slaughter and the male comradeship of the Vietnam war. It remains to be seen how it will land in an age of flashier death-game stories such as Squid Game and The Hunger Games (or, for that matter, the imminent remake of King’s The Running Man), although the plight of troubled young men in a fascist society is still very much a live issue, of course.
Director Francis Lawrence has form here: he directed several of the Hunger Games movies, but he seems determined to take a different tack here. Unlike the gaudy setting of those films, the only sense of the wider dystopian society we get here, apart from a few brief flashbacks, is the landscape the competitors wander through: an almost deserted, often picturesque rural America that looks like a William Eggleston photo album come to life.
It’s mentioned that the walk is being filmed and broadcast, but we don’t really hear about that again. And although some practicalities are addressed (defecation alert!), the human endurance aspect of the exercise is skirted over at times. At one point a walker has a problem with his shoes, for example, and is forced to discard them – a game-changing incident, you might think, but it is never mentioned again. And on they stagger towards the preordained conclusion, straining viewer endurance as much as their own.
The result comes across like a cross between a buddy movie and a horror movie – a war movie without the war. Ultimately, it all comes down to the core relationships, so it’s just as well that Hoffman and Jonsson are both terrific; their stars are certain to rise further off the back of this. But it is left to the viewer to fill in the gaps, suppress their niggling questions and just go along with it. Maybe, to mangle a familiar saying, the real treasure is the friends they made along the way, most of whom unfortunately get shot in the head.
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● The Long Walk is out on 11 September in Australia, and 12 September in the UK and US.
