The Long Walk is proof that making a good film adaptation of a Stephen King novel is possible

The Long Walk is one of the best adaptations of a Stephen King literary work seen in recent years in cinema, infinitely better than Edgar Wright's much more ambitious The Running Man starring Glenn Powell, released almost simultaneously in the Anglo-Saxon market. A Kingian derby in which almost no one would have bet on Francis Lawrence as the winner. A filmmaker straddling authorship and pop with a blockbuster in his hands seemed a much more appealing premise than a small, dark dystopian film directed by a minor director who almost by chance became the godfather of the Hunger Games film saga. Lawrence, in fact, directed three chapters of the original tetralogy with Jennifer Lawrence and the two prequels (the second arriving in the coming months). Due to that typically Hollywood decision-making process that tends to entrust projects that are always the same to a single name, he was given the direction of the adaptation of a novel considered by many to be the ancestor, the inspiration, the father of Suzanne Collins' literary saga.

The Matrix of The Hunger Games

Written in 1967, at a particularly brutal moment in the American writer's long career, The Long Walk is a Hunger Games stripped of the baroque grandeur and refined sadism of the world where Katniss and Peeta live. It is one of many stories from that period that sublimates the trauma of Vietnam for the United States into a dystopian context. Although not a war film, the atmosphere is decidedly paramilitary, as is the camaraderie among the protagonists and the relationships between the “ranks” in the story. In fact, it is a more masculine, essential, raw, and anti-militarist precursor to Hunger Games. Here too there is a deadly game to face, made cruel and despairing by the lack of a finish line or precise timing. Fifty boys, just over eighteen, one from each state of the Union, find themselves at the starting line of a brutal endurance race. They are asked to walk at no less than three miles per hour, without ever stopping, slowing down, or leaving the road pavement that continues for hundreds of miles in front of them. Those who slow down or stop, after three warnings, are shot on the spot by the soldiers accompanying their long march. The last one standing wins, with a rich cash prize and the possibility of having any wish granted. The march is broadcast live nationally and escorted by an armed contingent and the General (Mark Hamill), impassive and militaristic, who praises the courage of the participants in macho terms, never taking off his aviator sunglasses.

It is an essential narrative skeleton, whose critical points and obligatory turns are easy to guess from the premises. Lawrence has no problem filling it with interesting passages, because the story's premises touch on two of his strong points: the youthful perspective and a certain hopeless, dark approach.

Hoffman and Jonsson deliver a truly memorable duo performance

The Long Walk is also the kind of film that in ten or fifteen years can be revisited, recognizing much of the cast of (today's) young promises, led by the excellent Cooper Hoffman. Alongside the equally talented David Jonsson, they create a duo of great spontaneity and emotional intensity, capable of embodying the ingenuities and pains of the young protagonists authentically, with great empathy. Alongside them are other excellent actors who portray the supporting contestants with great incisiveness: performers like Charlie Plummer (as the swaggering bully) and Ben Wang (as the charismatic and superstitious kid) are already quite familiar faces to the most avid cinephiles, thanks to their careers rich in significant titles, despite their young age. Where the screenplay indulges in some overly conventional passages, it is the performance of a magnificent and well-guided cast that makes the difference. Hoffman and Jonsson, in the roles of the gentle and friendly Ray Garraty and the wise and charismatic Pete, weave a memorable and profound story of friendship in less than two hours, made of desperation and deep understanding for the pain of others.

Lawrence's well-crafted direction – who, compared to other colleagues who have adapted King, has a sparse story whose point is also a certain repetitiveness of scenarios and actions – does the rest, confirming that if his taste isn't exactly for extreme drama, he at least possesses the ability to make it cinematic, to give it a higher meaning, without turning it into pornography of pain. The only visual limitation of the film is visual effects that are often more evident in the macabre, explicit scenes of the executions of struggling participants. Being so noticeable to the viewer, it ends up dampening the horror that these deaths should evoke.

The film's weak point is a script that becomes increasingly conventional

What is lacking, if anything, is JT Mollner's writing, which draws on King's scathing and cruel imagination in writing the adaptation, but unfortunately often declines it in a trivial, predictable key. Here and there, one gets the impression that the cruelty shown in the film is more an obligatory passage, and therefore not very effective, than a powerful narrative evolution. Especially towards the end, the film slips a bit into rhetoric: not so much for the choices it makes, but for how it presents them to the viewer.

The writing, for example, struggles to build little more than a perception of what exactly happened in these dictatorial United States governed by a repressive military regime, where extreme economic poverty is widespread, making the application to participate in the long march an obligatory passage, rather than a free choice. All of this, however, is told to us, but it doesn't go much further than these assumptions, with a dictatorial specter that is little more than sketched. Why, for example, were the writings of the philosophers read by the protagonist Ray's father banned? One infers that the regime has a deeply misogynistic and nationalistic vision, but not why it should clash with Western literary culture. Cultural censorship thus appears so poorly introduced that it seems more a dystopian convention than a repression motivated by anything.
Much more incisive, however, is the visual language, the sparse images with which Lawrence tells this America: the silent families with drawn faces watching the boys pass, the horses galloping away hearing the shots, a silence and desolation that in their absence already say a great deal. 

Despite a long time having passed since the genesis of this story and many having used it as a starting point for updated versions of it, one unfortunately gets the impression that the film could have been much more than a very solid King adaptation, potentially becoming a great film in its entirety. Instead, it “settles” for being (along with Black Phone) one of the best recent film adaptations, also because King in this sense is particularly unlucky, given that his books often run into operations that are anything but successful. Considering how things turned out for someone as talented as Edgar Wright tackling The Running Man (which proved to be a failed film), there is reason to be satisfied.