Loved this to death.
5.)
The Long Walk (2025): 9.5/10
In an eerily empty, not-too-distant futuristic America, sixteen years after a nebulous war has crippled the country's economy, 50 desperate young men assemble for the most popular new competition, all hoping to be the one that captures a huge cash bounty as well as "The Prize", which boils down to any wish they could possibly desire, no matter how far-fetched. Our entry point is one Ray Garraty, competitor #47 (Cooper Hoffman), brought to the starting line by his distraught mother (Judy Greer, in a small but piercingly poignant performance). The rules, as laid down by the taciturn Major (an impassive, sunglasses-sporting Mark Hamill, hamming it up with a terse, George C. Scott rasp), are simple...the fifty young men must...walk, down a seemingly endless stretch of cracked, desolate roadway, their progress paced by a couple of tanks laden with soldiers armed with high-powered carbine rifles, maintaining a walking speed of at least three miles per hour (monitored by wristwatch pedometers). If their walking speed drops below that goal, a mechanized voice from within one of the pace vehicles barks out a stern warning. If they collect three warnings and their speed slacks off a fourth time...they're eliminated from The Walk, with a dispassionate but ruthlessly efficient bullet to the brainpan.
Adapted from the 1979 novel by Stephen King (which he penned at the tender age of nineteen and initially published as a paperback original under his pseudonym, "Richard Bachman") by screenwriter JT Mollner (who wrote and directed last year's exceptional, chronologically scrambled horror thriller
Strange Darling),
The Long Walk is a film that frankly, I feel like cheating including in this year's horror marathon (it's more of a cautionary, violent piece of hard-edged sci-fi), but it's mid-September, it's King, and I always like to "ease into" my all-horror bacchanal of October with thrillers that creep around the edges of the genre, and
The Long Walk, with its spurts of authentically shocking violence and overall air of despairing inevitability, certainly qualifies.
As a grim metaphor for the very act of living life, with the others around you falling away gradually due to accidents, disease or simply getting worn down over the course of years and decades, it's a gripping enough experience, but director Francis Lawrence shows a merciless, screw-tightening skill in stripping down King's narrative into a unornamented style that's quite different from the efficient, journeyman gloss of his previous studio pictures. This is no
Hunger Games (Lawrence helmed the last four out of five of them), with its central concept blunted down by the need to adhere to a PG-13 'tween audience, he pulls no punches in depicting the punishment, both physical and mental, the group of Walkers undergo as the miles pile up. They cannot stop to rest, to eat, to sleep, not even to move their bowels (graphically illustrated in one particularly undignified elimination from the Walk), and the film's talented cast rises to the occasion.
The gifted Hoffman, as our protagonist, is the perfect everyman, taking in the accumulation of horrors with initial disbelief melting away into a steadfast determination to simply keep picking them up and laying them down, and David Johnsson (one of the standouts in the generically young and pretty cast of last year's
Alien: Romulus) matches him as Peter McVries, the facially scarred member of small clique of Walkers who forms an unlikely friendship with Garraty and strives to keep up their spirits as, one by one, the competitors are mercilessly winnowed down by charley horses, seizures, colds, suicidal breaks for escape, or simply the deadening grind of fatigue as the miles climb into the hundreds and the sweltering days turn into chilly, often rain-soaked nights. Each bloodied body that hits the pavement with an awful smack of mortal finality will hit you with the dramatic and emotional force of a mushrooming hollow-point round.
The movie will certainly not be for all tastes -- it's destined to be the new
The Mist, a brilliant film with such a bleak, pessimistic worldview that audiences used to the tidier pop thrills and chills of the typical Kind movie adaptation will violently reject -- but for those with the stomach to stick with it, it's a haunting, harrowing experience that will stick with you for hours afterwards, and one of the best films of the year.
