Movie Review: The Long Walk

4 stars out of 5

I approve of Stephen King as an author and as a human being, but as I covered in my review of IT, I’ve never read his stuff or even seen most of the movies based on it. Which made The Long Walk another total surprise for me. The trailer really drew me in: A competition in which young men go for a, uh, lengthy stroll, where the last man standing wins and presumably everybody else dies. Dang! Even in Glengarry Glen Ross there was a second prize.

Now, we have two main participants and one is the lead actor, so anyone with any basic grasp of storytelling knows there are only two possible endings. So as a viewer (and in life, IMHO), it helps to be process-oriented rather than goal-oriented. How will we reach that one conclusion instead of the other? Everyone involved in this film helps make it a compelling journey: King with the story, relative unknown JT Mollner with the script, Hunger Games vet director Francis Lawrence, and a cast of talented young actors.

Leading the way is Cooper Hoffman as Ray. How lucky we are to have Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s son in our lives for decades to come! He was excellent in Licorice Pizza and he’s even better in this, showing the full range of human emotions (which one might expect over the course of walking hundreds of miles with machine guns pointed at you).

Nearly matching Hoffman performance-wise is David Jonsson (who I liked as a robot in Alien: Romulus) as fellow walker Pete. Also of note in a smaller role is Judy Greer as Ray’s mom. In the past decade, Greer has really found her niche as a loving divorced or widowed mom. I’m not going to say who plays the hardass major, as I didn’t know till the end credits, but he’s having a blast doing his best R. Lee Ermey impression.

The film’s long-walk format – unlike anything I’ve seen before, really — allows backstory and character development to come out bit by bit, very naturally. The exception to this is for some of the supporting actors, who briefly get the spotlight, deliver a little soliloquy about their rough upbringing, and then fall back in the pack. But at least for Hoffman, Jonsson, and a few of the walkers they bond with, we really see a realistic progression of friendship and trust.

Because story information is delivered piecemeal, we don’t know the era (young men walking through idyllic country landscapes actually called to mind the King adaptation Stand by Me and feels and looks old-timey, yet they have digital pedometers). We know there’s been a war but not who fought who or why or when or who won. (Does not look like we did, though.) But then we get a quick flashback showing that “subversive” books and music have been outlawed and that U.S. troops are policing our own citizens, and this dystopian tale written in 1979 felt current and real and terrifying.

Thankfully, through the young men’s conversations, we also hear a lot about love, religion, regret, appreciation, greed, ambition, hope, fear, desperation – the whole gamut of the human experience. So take a short drive or long walk to the multiplex and catch this one while it’s still around.