‘Superb,’ ‘staggering,’ or ‘oddly static’? Critics praise ‘The Long Walk’ for its grimness — with some reservations
After a decades-long journey to the big screen, the first novel that Stephen King ever wrote finally has a feature film adaptation. The Long Walk was originally published under the iconic author's Richard Bachman pseudonym and has tempted filmmakers with its dystopian premise since publication in 1979.
And based on the reviews for the Francis Lawrence-directed adaptation starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, and Mark Hamill, it seems the wait for fans of the novel was not in vain.
"Dystopian cinema doesn’t come much bleaker than the latest Stephen King story to hit the screen, directed by that aficionado of the genre, Francis Lawrence," writes The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck. "The Hunger Games filmmaker here does a superb job with material that could easily have proven tiresomely repetitive in lesser hands. While The Long Walk doesn’t entirely escape its narrative limitations, it features generous amounts of the sort of emotion and heart that have marked the best King adaptations. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less grueling."
Issues inherent to translating the novel's distinctly dark premise seem to have arisen, however. Namely, the straightforward nature of the conflict doesn't naturally lend itself to dynamic visual storytelling.
"For a movie about motion, The Long Walk feels oddly static, its washed-out images — a dead cow here, some live horses there — leaving the impression of a featureless nowhereland," writes The New York Times' Jeannette Catsoulis. "Lawrence’s commitment to authenticity may be laudable (he filmed almost the entire project on the move in Canada), but it’s clear that he was so busy honoring the book, he forgot to entertain the audience."
But, at the very least, The Long Walk is populated with strong performances that keep the movie emotionally grounded, despite its heightened reality.
"It helps, of course, that the film has such a staggering cast to work with; Hoffman and Jonsson make for such an invigorating pair, kids who maintain their moral center in an environment where kids would more likely behave like Barkovitch (taunting and sabotaging his fellow competitors so they fail and die), and building a small community of survivors around them whom they can lean on in times of exhaustion," writes RogerEbert.com's Clint Worthington. "Their backstories are thin, and revealed only through vague glimpses of dialogue (or what little we get of Judy Greer as Garraty’s worried mother). Still, the strength of the performances gives those gaps a mystique that wallpapers over their perceived thinness."
Overall, the reviews, which are mostly positive, herald a successful adaptation of a book that has been long ready for its moment in theaters. The film holds a 91 percent "certified fresh" ranking on Rotten Tomatoes and a 72 percent "generally favorable" aggregate score on Metacritic.
"This Long Walk indeed grows repetitive, its political message bluntly delivered in a finale that rewrites the book’s ending and is here set so unsubtly to 'America the Beautiful' that it makes the climactic shot of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out look positively conservative by comparison," writes IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio. "The Long Walk doesn’t tell you or ask you anything new if you’re feeling pent up with rage by American leadership these days, but the film’s grim commitment to the bit is a rarity for a studio movie: This long walk doesn’t hold your hand along the way, nor does it tuck you in and read you a bedtime story at the end."
