In a recovering America, every year the government holds a competition for the young men of the country, one from each state.  The task is simple; walk, maintain a pace of 3 miles per hour, and be the last man standing.  The prize is lifechanging; financial security for the rest of their life and the granting of a single wish. 

No stranger to YA dystopia, Francis Lawrence sets out to direct The Long Walk, an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel by the same name – the prolific horror writer’s first novel written, though not his first published work – with JT Mollner providing the script.  Mollner synthesizes the 384-page tome down to a 108-minute feature film that keeps a fittingly steady and trotting pace throughout.  Lionsgate took the film wide on some 2,400 screens without any festival leadup, mounting instead a savvy, eleventh hour influencer heavy marketing campaign to boast the merits of its buzzy cast of up-and-commers filling out the roles of Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), Hank Olson (Ben Wang), Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), with Mark Hamill rounding out the cast with some marketable gravitas as The Major.  

With such a simple premise that can be summed up in its three-word title, The Long Walk has little interest in fleshing out much backstory of any of these characters.  They are all here for one reason and one reason only: walk, or die.  With that being said, Mollner, as well as King, frames the narrative around Garraty which allows for a brief exposition dump as Ginnie Garraty (Judy Greer) drops her son off at the military base demarcating the start of the titular competition; the title card, however, has yet to appear.  Later on, we are further afforded a singular flashback to Raymond back at home with his mother and father (Josh Hamilton), that inform his reason for volunteering for a spot in the Long Walk.  These fringe details are both just enough of what we need to satisfy our curiosity of the world while letting Nicholas Lepage’s production design fill in the gaps of this duty, post-depression, post-industrial era United States, but it also opens up the glaring omission that almost all of the 49 remaining walkers are simply cannon fodder.  To be fair to Mollner, there is a dreaded limited series just below the surface where episode by episode the narrative delves deeper into who these characters are with extensive flashback sequences and perhaps some stunt casting to capture the morning-after Deadline headlines, so it is wise that he did not dawdle around, but these characters, across the board, stand for nothing, nor do they have much of a story to tell so that catharsis from their inevitable demise takes the shape of relief that the end is near more so than an actual narrative purging of emotions. 

The deaths in The Long Walk, though, are not empty.  The film is quite blunt about its violence, forcing the spectacle of headshot after headshot into something that is all part of the routine with pity and damnation to whomever – walker or audience, alike – that no longer feels the shock and horror of the frank brutality on display.  Notably, The Long Walk is not gratuitous in its violence, rather it treats it as simply a fact of life; a known and expected outcome of participation in the walk, accepted, surely, by a signed waiver and an understanding that participants most likely will not be returning home.  

Some 46 years ago when King first put pen to paper for his first novel, the situations that may have led the United States to falling into such dystopian despair may have seemed more of an exaggerated thought exercise than anything, but transported to a modern audience, the temperature of the film will undoubtedly bring a bead of sweat to one’s brow.  In an unfortunate example of art imitating life, The Long Walk debuted as Trump, in the early, yet still chaotic throes, of his second  term has galvanized his pursuit of authoritarian takeover in the wake of the assassination of MAGA-firebrand Charlie Kirk, mere hours before the East Coast preopens of the title.  Quickly working to commandeer the narrative – facts be damned – the powers that be have worked tirelessly to martyrize the mouthpiece and squash out any peep of dissent with threats and shows of violence.  It is a frightening mirror of the events of the film, especially when one considers that the systematic execution of these youth is seen as just part of life and televised to the nation, much in the same way that school shootings are written off as the price to pay for the second amendment and then the tragedy is milked for views by the media that come down on Anywhere, USA with their vans, cameras, and microphones offering not a moment of peace to the grieving families or the grieving nation, coast-to-coast, as they fill the airwaves 24/7 with coverage. 

Returning to look at the film within the confines of its 2.39:1 aspect ratio, we do find enough connection to these characters that their dispatch does lend itself to horror, but there is always a sense that we are playing catch-up and that something is missing in the translation from book to script to screen.  We understand this world in the most broad sense, and in simpler times if this were, say, a 1980’s programmer, that may have been enough, but in 2025 with the looming threat of fascism as apparent as cracks in a levee, to treat these themes with such softness feels almost irresponsible on behalf of the filmmaker and to merely accept this dull and unsharpened indictment of the overreach of power is an act of ignorance on behalf of the audience.  Beyond that, it sets the film in a strange sense of time with depression era imagery on the sides of the roads and costuming that does not help define the time period.  Dressed in denim and cotton, it can be understood that these boys may not have performance wear, but the clothing is so nondescript that it does not help to inform the world at all in a real missed opportunity to help differentiate these boys from a collection of any suburban high school class.  Even within the conceit of the film, there is little identity that these characters have to help standout other than their prominence on the page and their position on the call sheet.  This weak characterization undermines the otherwise strong, individual bits of scene work that can make us feel something in the moment while these boys are overcoming the next mental or physical hurdle of their endeavor, but it never builds into something overwhelming powerful.  As their bravado and their desire to impress wears down into the delirious need to survive, these characters never wander too far from their path before being executed, and yet it is in those hazy moments vulnerability where they either meet their fate or are rescued by one of their allies in the walk that they are at their most human.  Mollner’s script denies the actors a chance to dig deep into their characters and denies the audience a chance to build any true connection to these characters we are witnessing from a comfortable third person vantage courtesy of Jo Willems’ cinematography so that we always feel ever-so-slightly removed from the moments of what should be shocking terror or devastating developments of character. Thematically, again, this plays into how we can feel in the comfort of our living rooms during the wall to wall coverage of yet another tragedy that certainty could never happen here. 

While The Long Walk leaves much to be desired, it is still a faithful adaptation and does its best to be a satisfying film without any grander aspirations of spinoffs or launching a franchise.  The actors, saddled with their caricatures, all strive to give authentic performances with a standout coming late in the runtime through Collie Parker (Joshua Odjick), striking the perfect balance of showing enough to be understood and delivering a searing enough performance that the gaps are filled in through the rage which the actor fills their character with.  Had their been more of these moments, where these boys had chances to show themselves not as just boys with seldom on their mind, but young men who have a history – albeit a short one – already about them, forged through the experience of their home lives and their lives under a vengeful government, The Long Walk could have been a much more caustic and revelatory film, but as presented it ultimately falls flat, and detractors can easily exploit the massive hurdle of disbelief that must be crossed by audiences given the mile and date markers that chapter-mark the film.  The violence, while Willems’ camera, along with Mark Yoshikawa’s and Peggy Eghbalian’s work in the edit do their best to keep it jarring, eventually falls into repetitiveness, and the graftable thinness of the plot and characters that can be used as a mirror turns from a feature into a bug. The Long Walk has clearly always been a cautionary tale with a frightening message contained therein, but under Lawrence’s direction, he seems unsure if he wants to merely thrill the audience with spectacle or call them to action by holding their feet against the coals of the fire being stoked by a Major of our own making.  This flinching resolve not only waters down the impact of the story, but it is a gateway to complacency instead of the rallying cry which these stories of resistance so often can come to be.