The Long Walk (2025)

**½/****
starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill
screenplay by JT Mollner, based on the book by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My least favourite thing is to go after something I mostly agree with, made by people who seem well-intentioned despite failing to recognize their dangerous biases. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk nails who we are right now: a nation that leads the world in pride and trails the field in things to be proud of. A nation crowdfunding life-saving healthcare while bankrolling genocide. A nation where dozens of billionaires control the same amount of wealth as the millions of everyone else. Last I checked, the thing America laps every other industrialized country at is the percentage of our adult population that believes in angels. Throughout The Long Walk, the cartoonish Major (Mark Hamill), channelling the spirit of Sgt. Rock, lets loose with jingoistic statements about the greatness of these United States and how it will one day, through a baptism of blood and the violent suppression of generations of hope and self-worth, be great again. It’s “IRONIC” spelled out in blazing letters across a dystopian sky, like the fireworks that greet our heroes after their long walk–but what is irony when it’s just the facts? What is satire when we are beyond satire?

The notion of an annual death show to raise national morale is quaint in an era where Republican Congressmen call for public executions of political rivals and YouTube monsters make fortunes through humiliation contests waged for bricks of views-sponsored cash. There was a time the murder of children for political profit was seen as nihilistic science-fiction–long about the time Stephen King wrote The Long Walk and other nasty stuff under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, as it happens–but those days are long past. Today, children around the world get turned to mist by our munitions on live feeds of their families begging for pennies for flour to make bread. We have learned a hard lesson about our ideals as a bulwark against one small push. They were like the chain on your door: it’s a good discouragement for attack and home invasion, as long as no one tests it. None of that’s The Long Walk‘s fault, of course. Its naivety is a product of a simpler time, like the ending of another fine King adaptation, Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, in which a politician revealing himself to be the worst person on the planet ends his political career instantly. I say “simpler time,” knowing that the time I’m referring to, which influenced the writing of The Long Walk, was Vietnam-era America, when we were about to have what we thought was the worst, most criminal President there could ever be and couldn’t imagine anything more horrific than seeing our draft-age kids get torn apart on primetime television. We were such sweet summer children then, weren’t we?

Still, Lawrence wrings some poignancy from the premise. His The Long Walk is buoyed by Cooper Hoffman as Garraty, a buttermilk-scrubbed kid with vengeance on his mind, and David Jonsson as the wise, charismatic, benevolent McVries. The two of them join a throng of other boys of a certain age, tasked with walking in a straight line until there’s only one of them left to claim a vast sum of money and one wish the authoritarian State must grant. The premise betrays Stephen King’s English-teacher background, of course–a lost Kierkegaardian parable perhaps, married to Kafka…or O. Henry. It’s tidy and literary and, as such, filled with characters that can be broken down into clumsy allegorical tropes: the Hobbesian and the Calvinist who form an alliance; a Marxist here, a Leninist there… Regardless, the cast is exceptional. Charlie Plummer’s twitchy psychopath Barkovitch stands out, in particular, as a sort of “Puck on the third season of ‘The Real World’,” giving America a preview of coming attractions as to what happens when scary narcissism is allowed to bloom like a bad mushroom and presented for your entertainment without the sober guardrails someone like Rod Serling erected around world-destroying monsters like this. Puck meant big ratings. He became our new Uncle Sam. We let him into our homes, and he never fucking left. He probably never will.

There’s also comic-relief Olson, who speaks with a soft impediment, it sounds like, and says his wish, should he win it all, is “ten naked ladies” who will come over to his house. When told that he could buy the services of ten ladies himself, he says the idea of prostitution is “gross,” but then he’s informed that any ten ladies going to his house to honour his wish would be paid for by someone. Olson is chastened. “Geez, I hadn’t thought of that.” He is teased for being well-read, but not so well-read that he knows there are four musketeers instead of three. Did I mention the food allergy? And did I mention Olson is portrayed by the only Chinese guy in the cast? (Ben Wang.) Did I need to? We should talk about Parker, too. Parker, the proud, quiet kid who dies a noble death after wrestling a gun away from one of the guards there to ensure the boys keep up a three-mile-per-hour pace, lest they catch a bullet to the brain. Mortally wounded, Parker says a prayer in (I believe) Algonquin before choosing his own way out. Joshua Odjick, the lone First Nations actor in the group, plays Parker. I thought a lot about Sonny Landham’s self-sacrifice in Predator (1987), how it made sense to me that an indigenous man would die this way in the forest, amongst nature, when I was 14 and how deadly it is these ideas can be embedded in us like shrapnel fragments from a war we didn’t even really know we were fighting.

And you could say to me, “But isn’t it better to have some representation than none?” I would answer that I used to think so but don’t anymore. I don’t even think it’s representation when you cast for diversity without taking care that the reason you’re choosing someone’s ethnicity likely has something to do with how you watched Sixteen Candles at a sleepover when you were 12. Given that, I thought the Black characters were pretty well-served in The Long Walk, especially as Stephen King has a known and notorious proclivity for writing Super-Duper Magical Negro figures in his stories (King being the Victor Frankenstein behind the character that inspired Spike Lee to coin the term in the first place). It helps that some smart work has been done with the character of McVries; like the book, the film ends with a noble sacrifice, yet there appears to have been some thought given to the optics of another white saviour story featuring a Black facilitator/martyr. It helps more that McVries isn’t the only Black character in the film, thus the entire weight of representation doesn’t fall on him. And it helps immeasurably that he’s played by Jonsson, who brings so much dignity and complexity to his characters that you patronize him at your peril. He is our next great actor–a label he arguably shares with Cooper Hoffman, who has big shoes to fill, and does. A scene where Garraty apologizes to his mother (Judy Greer, here mainly to cry) for the choices he’s made as a young, impetuous man is genuinely gripping and perhaps reason alone to recommend the film, whatever its shortcomings. 

See, if it’s a warning, The Long Walk is too late. If it’s a documentary, it offers no fresh insights. Greed and violence have broken America? Got it. Does The Long Walk resonate as an object, though? That I could possibly get behind. Here’s a piece that tells the tale of the end of our empire–the same one we’re witnessing in real-time outside our front door–but doesn’t entirely understand that the devices dictating its casting and story are the same ingredients that have contributed to our embarrassingly stupid collapse. Lightning seeds planted by the Southern Strategy come to flower in 2025 as the emboldened resurrection of all the old viruses we thought we’d inoculated against in the oceans of blood spilled over our first 200 years. Literally. Watch The Long Walk as though it were a blueprint for what happened. The path to Hell, paved with these good liberal intentions. Not the Nazis, but the people who were supposed to protect us from them. “Uh oh, we need an Asian boy. Get that kid from Karate Kid: Legends. Have him be the funny one who wants a bouquet of naked ladies. And, oh, yeah, get an Indian to be the warrior. Wouldn’t it be cool if he did like a war chant before he dies?” Yeah, cool. Thanks a motherfucking pantload. Maybe spend some of this self-pleasuring generosity on the kind of introspection that might slow these feckless quislings’ race to capitulate. Maybe if all the kids rushed the Major at the same time, not all of them would’ve had to die while their “ride or die” allies watched on live television. Maybe someone should’ve given Garraty their shoes before sacrificing themselves to the gears of this machinery, if they’re such stalwart comrades. Maybe they should’ve had Leia convince the enslaved Stormtroopers to revolt against their badly outnumbered masters. I’m just thinking out loud here.