Joshua Odjick, Jordan Gonzalez, David Jonsson, Cooper Hoffman and Charlie Plummer in The Long Walk, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel.Murray Close/Lionsgate
The Long Walk
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Written by JT Mollner, based on the novel by Stephen King
Starring David Jonsson, Cooper Hoffman and Mark Hamill
Classification 14A; 108 minutes
Opens in theatres Sept. 12
The rules of The Long Walk are simple. In a near-future United States torn apart by civil war and now ruled by a fascist regime (huh), the nation’s spirits are lifted every year during the tournament of the title: an endurance test that pits a group of young men against each other in a deadly but leisurely paced marathon. Basically, stop walking, you get shot dead. The contest ends only when one walker remains alive.
That’s a nifty postapocalyptic conceit – or it certainly was back when Stephen King invented it for his 1979 novel of the same name (written under his pseudonym Richard Bachman). Since then, though, the “young adults in postapocalyptic tournament to the death” angle has been imitated and then Xerox’d to death. Heck, even The Long Walk director Francis Lawrence knows the rules of the game, given his work on the Hunger Games franchise.
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And so the challenge of finally bringing The Long Walk to the screen – at various points over the past several decades, filmmakers such as George A. Romero and Frank Darabont have tried – is how to treat the now-conventional idea in a novel fashion. Is everyone really so eager to watch photogenic young men get shot in the head over and over? Well, sorta, yeah.
The approach that Lawrence lands on is one of rural minimalism. For the film’s duration, our eyes are only on the boys and the desolate Middle America road they’re gradually barrelling down. Although the tournament is televised, the film never cuts away to how the program might be presented – there’s no equivalent of Hunger Games’ Caesar Flickerman here – nor much of an idea as to what, exactly, this terrible version of America looks like. It is a film dependent on conceit and character alone. Which means that Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner better have some exceptional characters.
Mark Hamill plays the major in charge of the walk.Murray Close/Lionsgate
And they do, for the most part. The two obvious heroes of the journey are Raymond (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter (David Jonsson), the former participating for a vague mission of revenge against the major (Mark Hamill) who’s running the walk, the latter simply in it for the prize money. But while the two participants have an easy camaraderie with one another – and Hoffman and Jonsson are so naturally charismatic performers that they can make the most diametrically opposed personas connect – they’re surrounded by stock characters that easily grate.
There’s the wiseass (Ben Wang, doing some kind of Joe Pesci impersonation), the bully (Charlie Plummer), the tough guy with a secret (Garrett Wareing), the weakling (Roman Griffin Davis), and so on. This collective of clichés might not be so unbearable were it not for the fact that Mollner’s film is largely dialogue-based, with only Raymond and Peter given much in the way of compelling conversation. There’s no compelling villain, either, given that Hamill seems to essentially be playing a more gruff version of Josh Brolin.
While Lawrence keeps the momentum steady – just like his contest’s most able-bodied walkers – and ensures that every few minutes delivers some kind of violent jolt, there’s just not enough meat to this particular roadkill story to keep one cinematic foot in front of the other. Perhaps the season’s next King adaptation will have a bit more pep in its step: Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man.
