Nearly 50 years since Brian De Palma adapted Carrie for the big screen, the works of Stephen King have been a resource that Hollywood has exploited time and time again.
2025 has already seen The Monkey and the superb The Life Of Chuck hit our screens, and November will see Glen Powell star in a remake of The Running Man.
The Long Walk might end up being the best King adaptation of the lot.
King’s output is so exhaustive that Hollywood are making movies of the books he wrote under the Richard Bachman moniker, and they have hit gold with The Long Walk.
A brilliant premise – 50 boys take part in a never-ending walk, with just one winner – is ripe with cinematic potential, and The Long Walk takes full advantage of the premise.
The novel was published in the late 1970s as a commentary on the sour mood in American society at the time; the setting for the novel is an America that has fallen into dystopia and economic hardship, and the military has an outsized role in society.
The more things change, the more things stay the same, as they say.
2025 is the exact right moment for the novel to get the big screen treatment, and the movie really lucked out in getting a great director involved, Francis Lawrence.
Lawrence is one of the most quietly effective studio directors working today, with Lawrence playing a large part in making The Hunger Games one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood.
Lawrence is the quintessential journeyman director; he comes in, does a good job and always gives you results, the Denis Irwin of film directors.
The comparisons between the books are quite striking – young people are thrown in a brutal winner-takes-all situation amid a dystopian backdrop – and Lawrence smartly leans into the comparisons.
Much like how The Hunger Games made a global star of Jennifer Lawrence, The Long Walk boasts a future superstar of stars of their own in the form of Cooper Hoffman.
Son of the much-missed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Cooper Hoffman is a chip off the old block and is a major part of why this movie works so well.
The premise of 50 young men facing life-and-death odds and having them picked off one by one has an in-built tension; the movie has the genius idea of fleshing out as many of the characters as possible which makes it that much tougher when they bite the dust.
Hoffman stars as Ray, a young man who has signed up for The Long Walk, and one of the 50 competitors looking to win the top prize of a wish of their choice and a large sum of money.
The rules of the walk are easy – no breaks, toilet breaks must be taken on the walk, and each competitor gets three warnings before they are shot.
The script goes through great lengths to give the competitors something memorable or a character hook you can remember (one character is going to write a book about the whole thing, another chews gum the entire time, another is a classic Stephen King psychopath), and it works wonders.
With nothing but each other and the empty roads for company, the competitors start to form a bond, and that makes it that much harder when they start dropping like flies.
Hoffman’s performance at the heart of the film is affable; you genuinely believe in the goodness of the guy, and he wants to help everyone else succeed.
His bright-eyed idealism butts up against the cruel realities of the game – there can only be one survivor, remember? – and that lends the film extra weight.
At the heart of the movie, Ray forms a strong brotherhood with fellow contestant Pete, played by up-and-comer David Jonsson.
Jonsson was seen in last year’s so-so Alien Romulus as an android, and broke out on the British TV drama Industry; this should be the performance that sends him to the A-list.
Jonsson’s performance is so naturalistic and unforced that it feels like they picked a random guy off the street to act (even though he’s a classically trained RADA actor)
The relationship between Hoffman and Jonsson is the engine of the movie, and what elevates a movie with a cool premise to a great movie that stands up as a fantastic King adaptation.
Mark Hamill is thrown in for colour as the military man who is barking encouragement to the contestants and reminding the young men that they are an inspiration to a nation that desperately needs some.
Hamill is no longer the fresh-faced boy who played Luke Skywalker 50 years ago, and seeing him as a grizzled military man is sure to throw audiences for a loop in a good way.
The audience buy-in will depend on how much you can tolerate King’s style of writing characters (that is to say, foul-mouthed, vulgar, a few sandwiches short of a picnic), but the reward is two of the best performances we’ve seen in a film this year.
As the mileage ramps up and the other contestants start to drop like flies, you feel as tired as the main characters by the end of the film, and that is down to how well-paced the script is.
Clocking in at just over 1 hour and 40 minutes, there are enough lulls for the script to flesh out and develop the characters while also delivering the bouts of violence that will satisfy King fans.
The violence in the movie is never far away, and the soldiers riding along the contestants with carbine rifles pointed at them serve as a Sword of Damocles are a constant reminder that the character you’re watching on screen may get shot at any moment.
King adaptations come in all shapes and sizes, as we discussed in our Life Of Chuck review in August.
Using dramas like Shawshank and more straight horror adaptations like The Shining as a template, this lands somewhere in the middle.
The film is more tense than scary, and more of a character drama than a thriller.
All that to say, this is the most we’ve been surprised by a film in some time.
Cinematic adaptations of King’s work are as common as a cloudy day in Ireland, but every so often, we get adaptations that cut through the noise.
The Long Walk is one such adaptation, and there’s a strong chance this ends up in our year-end top 10.