The film-makers surely hope that, nearly 60 years after Stephen King first sat down to write The Long Walk, the overdue adaptation feels, to drag out a critical cliche, more relevant than ever. They need not worry. Francis Lawrence’s excellent film barely needs a tweak of the source to remind US viewers of their increased adjacency to totalitarianism.
That noted, King’s novel, eventually published in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, looked backwards as much as forwards. The high concept suggests the gruelling dance marathons of the Depression that provided the inspiration for Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
In the film’s dystopia, young men raised in the economic slump that follows a fascist takeover enter a walking race that ends in execution for all but the winner. Participants must maintain a steady pace. Fail to keep up and you get a warning. On your third strike, the accompanying soldiers put a bullet through your head.
Cooper Hoffman plays the introverted, dogged Raymond Garraty, a young man hoping to make up for sins against his father. David Jonsson, among the best young British actors of the age, is an intelligent cynic with a mysterious scar. The two form a cautious friendship as antagonists drop around them.
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Lawrence, the director of several films in the not-unrelated Hunger Games series, is stuck with an awkward challenge here. Virtually the entire film is taken up with a diminishing party of men walking across the yawning plains of North America. Indeed, the script could, with only a few adjustments, be reconstructed as a stage play.
Not for nothing is King so often adapted to the screen. JT Mollner’s screenplay takes some liberties with the book, particularly at the close, but the film retains the novelist’s penchant for sketching a wide array of characters with a few defining traits.
We instantly know that Charlie Plummer is playing the niggling bully. There is no doubt that Ben Wang is the neurotic obsessive. The least said about Mark Hamill’s role as the despotic “Major” the soonest mended – they really needed a Stacy Keach type – but the competing cast bust every tendon in creating gripping ambulatory drama.
Allegories are unavoidable. The walk is American capitalism. The walk is life itself. It requires, however, no such connections to enjoy the best King adaptations in many years.
In cinemas from Friday, September 12th
