Anticipation.
Another week, another Stephen King adaptation.
Enjoyment.
Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are both superb in the leads.
In Retrospect.
Lacking in originality while overloaded with cynicism.
The director of The Hunger Games pivots towards gnarly allegory in this violent Stephen King adaptation about a hike to the death.
TV and cinema is obsessed with selling us the notion that people are, in the main, absolutely fine with watching people dying in the name of live entertainment. The sordid ritual of attending public hangings or floggings died out when other, more wholesome forms of family entertainment entered the public purview. And yet storytellers are now fixated with dreaming up new must-win contests in which those that don’t manage to defeat their determined opponents are subject to some sort of humiliating (and, in the case of Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk, leerily graphic) demise.
From the dystopian human-hunting runaround that was ‘The Most Dangerous Game’, through to genuinely harrowing responses to economic depressions such as ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They?’ and acerbic genre films such as Battle Royale, we now seem to have an enforced deathsport of the week mandate for visual entertainment, where there’s never a “better luck next time…” for the losers. The Long Walk is adapted by screenwriter J.T. Mollner from a 1979 novella by Stephen King, and has clearly been dredged up to provide contemporary commentary on an America that’s currently being throttled by tinpot demagoguery and a general air of depraved malevolence.
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A civil war has left the US in a state of penury and moral turpitude, and so apparently the best way to boost public morale is to host a televised death march in which 50 boys head on a long walk with no destination. Those who drop below 3mph for too long, well… it’s a rifle round to the cranium, presented by director Francis Lawrence in extreme close-up and from every vantage imaginable across the mega trek.
Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) is walker 47, in the mix for mysterious personal reasons rather than the cash jackpot and the fulfilling of a single wish by a gravel-voiced, militaristic overseer known as The Major, menacingly played by Mark Hamill. Garrity makes fast friends with walker 23, Peter McVries (David Jonsson), who becomes his saviour during a few foul-ups, and the pair assist one another as the other boys fall by the wayside (and to their doom) for all manner of superficial reasons.
The film works best when it allows the boys to simply shoot the breeze and discuss the lives they’ve led up to this moment. Though the majority of the contestants are simply there as canon fodder for Lawrence and his gore SFX team, there’s a central ensemble who are allowed a little bit of back story to make the point that, when the government is corrupt, all human archetypes can fall under the hammer. As long as those archetypes are male.
The film’s cynicism can be forgiven to an extent as it’s baked into its entire concept, but there’s a distinct lack of mystery to how things play out, and it becomes fairly obvious to see who’s going to drop and how just from a few simple traits. It’s an interesting choice, though, to never reveal the perspective of the viewers or any other characters who aren’t present on the walk. We know this grim ordeal is being caught on cameras that look like the scopes on sniper rifles, but is anyone actually watching?
In a crowded field for these types of stories, The Long Walk is happy to keep pace in the middle of the pack before puttering out a little way from the finishing line.
