The Long Walk

This relentlessly bleak, laughably illogical, yet undeniably compelling picture is the latest adaptation from Stephen King's seemingly endless supply of lesser-known novels and short stories (this one written in 1979 under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman). Set in a dystopian future—though it seems to maintain its 1970s period, so that would make it a 1970s vision of a dystopian future (all details about how society works are left unexplained)—the story follows fifty boys, one from each state, in an annually televised competition meant to inspire the masses. The kids start from the same point and continue walking until only one competitor remains. A pace of three miles per hour must be maintained at all times, with failure to do so after three warnings resulting in being shot in the head by the army dudes who follow the pack in a tank keeping pace. The last boy walking wins fabulous riches and is granted any wish of his choice.

Even with these prizes, it is exceedingly difficult to fathom why anyone would volunteer for this contest. We're told that America has been through a devastating war and is now a totalitarian military regime with a devastated economy, but from the brief glimpses we get of the world outside The Walk, it doesn't seem nearly bad enough to convince anyone to sign up for a grueling suicide mission in which their odds of survival are 49 to 1. How this contest is broadcast to the public is also never explained; we see no cameras, drones, or anything that would indicate how a compelling program is made for those watching at home. But the most difficult thing to understand is why most of these boys treat The Walk as if the key to winning is ensuring the survival of their fellow competitors, when in fact the opposite is true. Thus, The Walk, which likely started out as an allegory for the Vietnam draft and transformed into a metaphor for reality television and how little value contemporary leaders place on the lives of children, ends up playing more like a comforting Gen-Z Rollerball in which most of the characters are exceedingly nice to each other, because, you know, that's how kids would act in a dystopian future.

It's not that this R-rated movie isn't bleak as hell, it is, but there's no denighing that the film works best if you pretened it's based on a YA novel and cut it an unbelivable amount of slack by imagining you are a twevle-year-old who doesn't worry too much about critical thinking when you're involved with characters you like and can relate to. Then you can appreciate the fine performances of a talented ensemble of young actors led by Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson. You can also try to overlook the absurdity of Mark Hamill's villain, a fascist army Major who oversees the contest by popping in every once in a while to give the boys a pep talk (Hamill seems to have embarked on a third career of delivering subpar performances in Steven King adaptations).

I commend screenwriter JT Mollner (Outlaws and Angels, Strange Darling) and director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, Red Sparrow, and many entries of the similarly themed Hunger Games franchise) for building such an elegant suspension of disbelief bridge over the enormous gulf of logical inconsistencies that comprise virtually every aspect of The Walk. These filmmakers are able to find nuance and grace in an allegorical story that is undenighably a much better fit for the pages of a novel than the frames of a motion picture.