The Long Walk (2025)
★★½ — The Long Walk (2025)
Stephen King published The Long Walk as a novel in 1979, under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, and it has spent decades sitting in a kind of Hollywood purgatory, optioned and re-optioned, talked about but never made. The story's premise is almost offensively simple: in a version of America that took a sharp authoritarian turn sometime in the mid-twentieth century, one hundred boys set off walking and must maintain a pace of at least four miles per hour or face immediate execution by soldiers marching alongside them. The last boy walking wins, though what exactly he wins is one of the book's more troubling questions. That the material sat unproduced for so long is, in hindsight, understandable. Its relentlessness, both in pace and in moral outlook, makes it a tricky proposition for a mainstream studio. Now, after several decades, Lionsgate and Vertigo Entertainment have finally put the film into production, and it arrives in 2025 running at 108 minutes.
The director Francis Lawrence is no stranger to either the dystopian end of science fiction or to the demands of survival-competition stories. He handled The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), which remains probably the most accomplished entry in that franchise, and earlier in his career he made I Am Legend (2007), another film built around a single person grinding through an inhospitable world. He is, on the evidence of that back catalogue, a director who can handle atmosphere and scale well enough. Whether that experience translates to the specific, almost perversely confined demands of King's source material is a reasonable question going in. The cast is led by Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and previously seen in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, alongside David Jonsson, Ben Wang, Tut Nyuot, and Charlie Plummer. It is, on paper, an interesting collection of younger performers, several of whom have shown real promise in other projects. The ensemble format does place unusual demands on a young cast: there is no real relief, no subplot happening elsewhere, just boys walking and talking and deteriorating together over the course of the film's runtime.
For a genre that has, since around 2000, become genuinely crowded, from Battle Royale through the Hunger Games series to Squid Game on television, any new entry has to find some angle that earns its place in the conversation. The King source material is, if anything, the purest and earliest version of the form, which gives The Long Walk a certain historical claim to the territory. Whether the film makes good on that claim is, as ever, the thing. You can also find my thoughts on other recent science fiction and thriller films such as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) elsewhere on the site, if you want a sense of where I set the bar for this kind of relentless, world-building genre work.
The Long Walk (2025) wears its influences on its sleeve (most obviously Battle Royale and, by extension, the entire dystopian-competition subgenre) but fails to carve out a distinct identity of its own. Set in a near-future authoritarian state where teenage boys are forced to march endlessly until only one remains standing, the premise promises tension, moral decay, and psychological unraveling. Yet what unfolds is a disappointingly flat retread: scene after scene of weary trudging, minor confrontations, and predictable eliminations that follow a rigid “and then, and then, and then” structure with little narrative momentum or surprise. The film’s biggest weakness lies in its execution. The performances are largely underwhelming, with most of the young cast delivering lines with either wooden stoicism or melodramatic urgency that rarely feels authentic. There’s minimal character development, so it’s hard to invest emotionally when yet another boy collapses or turns violent, it all starts to blur into repetitive grimness. Even the central protagonist lacks depth; his internal struggle is stated more than shown, leaving his journey feeling hollow rather than harrowing. Visually, the film opts for a desaturated, rain-soaked aesthetic that quickly becomes monotonous. While clearly aiming for bleak realism, it sacrifices atmosphere and visual storytelling in the process. And despite its high-concept setup, the script offers no fresh commentary on conformity, state control, or survival, it simply replays tropes we’ve seen done sharper and more inventively elsewhere. The Long Walk isn’t outright bad, but it’s thoroughly average. A competent but uninspired entry in a crowded genre. It has the bones of something potent but lacks the vision, acting, or narrative ingenuity to stand out. If you’ve seen Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, or even Squid Game, you’ll spot every beat coming from miles away. A missed opportunity, not a disaster.
For me, that sense of a missed opportunity is probably the sharpest thing to take away from this one. King's novel endures precisely because it gets inside the boys' heads in a way that makes the monotony feel purposeful rather than punishing, and a film adaptation had every chance to do something similarly immersive with a strong visual language. Instead it settles for a polished but unremarkable grimness, which is arguably the worst outcome: not interesting enough to defend, not bad enough to be entertainingly wrong-headed. Francis Lawrence has shown before that he can handle this sort of material with real conviction, so the flatness here is all the more deflating. If the premise has you curious, you are honestly better served going back to the source novel. It does the walk justice. This film, for all its potential, just trudges.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-05-10
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Long Walk (2025) on YouTube
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More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · Invaders from Mars (1953)
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