6.5

Francis Lawrence Takes The Long Walk Through Stephen King Country

By Jesse Hassenger  |  September 9, 2025 | 1:35pm
Movies Reviews Francis Lawrence
Francis Lawrence Takes The Long Walk Through Stephen King Country

Wait around long enough, and your fictional dystopia will start to seem prescient, no matter if it’s intended to comment on the present or the past. Stephen King’s The Long Walk was published in 1979, about a totalitarian United States rebuilt from what sounds like some kind of second Civil War, where young men are selected to take part in a deadly annual contest with just one living survivor. King had been working on the manuscript for years, and it’s easy to see the story as a Vietnam War allegory: boys just barely indoctrinated into adulthood, receiving what amounts to draft letters, knowing that most of them will die senselessly, hoping for some abstract happy-ending reward, with full government approval. Nearly a half-century later, it’s the totalitarian stuff that resonates – the America that looks more or less as you remember, but has been hollowed out by compliance with a vicious regime.

Despite the seeming lack of a televised component, the work seems like a major influence on The Hunger Games, and that book-turned-movie series returns a favor of sorts by lending director Francis Lawrence to this adaptation of The Long Walk. Lawrence has helmed all of the Hunger Games movies except the first one, and here faces an elimination challenge of his own. There are no elaborate weapons or engineered gaming environments for the contestants. Lawrence is mostly shooting a diminishing group of people walking along a long road, maintaining required pace of three miles per hour. (In the book, it’s four. These are the kinds of decisions I imagine the Presidential Council in Physical Fitness making.) Tanks and armed guards move alongside them, ready to issue warnings to anyone who falls below pace. After a third warning, contestants are executed. Contestants who attempt to deviate from the path or otherwise escape or rabble-rouse are also executed. There are no sleep or bathroom breaks. The object is to walk until no one else is standing. Long takes where the camera tracks backward, observing people walking, fill with dread. Instead of the usual horror-movie apprehension over what might pop out, you’re left wondering about who will drop.

Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) harbors contradictory feelings about the walk, as one must. Despite the abject horror of the situation, participants are selected by lottery, under the enforced assumption that if you do manage to win, it would be a dream come true. (Possibly literally; in addition to wealth, the winner is awarded a wish that the government will endeavor to grant.) Raymond knows he is devastating his mother (Judy Greer) by not backing out ahead of time – a supposed possibility that no one seems to exercise, seemingly out of a tacit understanding that this really is all mandatory. Yet Raymond doesn’t press too hard on his observation that no one ever says no to the walk, for reasons that become clear later in the picture. And even as he hopes and plans to win, Raymond remains a friendly sort, not seeking to manipulate or even particularly compete with his fellow man. He quickly and instinctively buddies up with Peter (David Jonsson), as well as Arthur (Tut Nyot) and Hank (Ben Wang). They stick together and help each other, as much as that’s possible knowing that, barring a miracle, they’ll all be dead in well under a week.

With such a ghoulish hook and a couple of instantly empathetic lead performances, it’s difficult to look away from The Long Walk. At the same time, it’s also difficult to take the movie on its own terms because, like its accidental 2025 companion piece The Life of Chuck, it is noticeably, sometimes almost toxically self-conscious about its Kingliness. The Vietnam allegory scans so easily in part because King’s dialogue, presumably adapted with some fidelity by JT Mollner, makes roughly college-aged kids all sound like they’re members of the same old-timey platoon of scrappy greasers, wisecracking and razzing with the same overwritten color as the younger characters from It.

Probably this works better on the page; that was certainly the case with It. On the screen, it’s sometimes overly literal, the grim tone predictably rendered with overcast skyscapes and barren stretches of gray road. There’s hardly a shred of visual contrast or, as such, irony; the movie brings to mind the current moment and a legacy of manufactured consent without saying much new, or even all that interesting, about any of it. That might require a freer approach to adaptation, and like Chuck, The Long Walk comes with a distracting aura of reverence, the same holy-text respect that often keeps those Hunger Games adaptations solidly in the realm of respectable – only the prose of those books is spare almost to a fault, which has the advantage of giving the actors some breathing room.

Hoffman and Jonsson do manage to carve out some space for themselves here. With subtle physical gestures and old-fashioned magnetism, they dimensionalize the cheeseball chumminess the script hands them, and often make the movie work in spite of itself. Or maybe they just look restrained next to Mark Hamill, bringing one of his patented wacky voices to live action as The Major, the architect of this event (and also the entire country? It’s a little unclear) who pops up to bark cartoonishly evil encouragement to the players along the way. Hamill – who can be an effective character actor when his hammier instincts are kept in check – was in Chuck, too, making the new movie feel all the more like an unholy combination of extended universe and mawkish awards bait from some mythical, geek-friendly governing body. (Put it this way: The Long Walk would have made a lot of top ten lists at the old Ain’t It Cool News.) King is such an inviting and sometimes irreverent author – qualities that are diminished when filmmakers seem so awed by his work. The Long Walk reaches for something profound and disturbing, while at the same time wary of risking a bad stretch.

Director: Francis Lawrence
Writer: JT Mollner
Starring: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Ben Wang, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Judy Greer, Mark Hamill
Release Date: Sept. 12, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

 
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