The Long Walk
First screened in December 2025
Director: Francis Lawrence. Cast: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Roman Griffin Davis, Jordan Gonzalez, Tut Nyuot, Joshua Odjick, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Garrett Wareing, Mark Hamill, Judy Greer, Josh Hamilton, Samuel Clark, Daymon Wrightly. Screenplay: JT Mollner (based on the novel by "Richard Bachmann," i.e., Stephen King). In Brief:
Overextended, blandly filmed premise yields none of its presumed allegorical resonance. Didn't buy the larger world.
VOR:②
Filmmakers jockeyed for years to adapt this. I sort of get it on paper, but this version suggests what a tricky and maybe pointless exercise it is.
The Long Walk manages to go wrong in an almost impressive number of ways, particularly since the whole movie is mostly a static situation played again and again along an unchanging arc that's telegraphed early and often. On the whole, its premise hasn't been fitted well for cinema, narratively or photographically. The world-building is vague and its details discordant, the multiple executions are graphic beyond reason, and the median age of the actors is too high. For a competition with (this is stressed) no finish line, the pacing feels too fast and too slow, en route to a, yep, two-hours-away conclusion that dramatically conforms to almost everything I predicted and that you will, too. It will not, however, feel at the end like the still-living characters have been walking continuously for 300 cramping and delirious miles, which I admit I had expected, or at least hoped.
Even within a shakily conceived exercise, it's disappointing that all kinds of details feel off and that most of the individual performances are middling to weak. Despite that pre-announced prize from the Independent Spirits, the young(ish) actors never jell into a palpable ensemble—partly down to the storyline and the staging, which keep them all facing away from each other and none-too-richly framed, but also because each actor seems all caught up in fluorescently conveying his already-straightforward character to Lawrence's camera. Not a lot of listening or co-creating of moments or relationships, and not a lot of secrets beyond those climactically announced, though again the fault isn't all the cast's. They are trapped in a script that keeps underscoring the obvious, which puts no premium on insinuation and may even lure the performers toward a comparable level of overstatement.
In an unhappy way, the whole project exemplifies the difference between an ensemble film and a movie with a large dramatis personae who are indeed in a lot of the same scenes. And while the driving conceit suggests all kinds of too-obvious metaphors (war, capitalism, reality media, mortality itself), not one of them hangs together coherently by the end. What we're left with is an ill-acted, more-produced-than-directed allegory that fails to meaningfully allegorize anything. I can't imagine Robert Altman, the namesake of that juried Spirit award, having anything nice to say about this. Grade:C–
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you like.)
