Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of Stephen King’s death march is grim, honest about what it shows, and carried by Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson. It has a single idea and walks it for 108 minutes; the idea holds longer than we expected, though not all the way.
Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) is dropped at a roadside before dawn by his mother (Judy Greer), who does not want him to go and cannot stop him. He has volunteered for the Long Walk, a contest in which teenage boys set off along a country road and keep going. Fall below the pace and you are warned. Three warnings and the soldiers in the truck behind you shoot you where you stand. The last boy walking gets whatever he wants for the rest of his life. Francis Lawrence, who directed most of the Hunger Games films, has made something far plainer here: a good film, hard to sit through, built on one idea, and it walks that idea further than we thought it could.
Jo Willems shoots nearly all of it outdoors under flat grey skies, and he keeps the camera moving beside the boys at walking pace, so that we rarely get ahead of them or fall behind. Nicolas Lepage’s production design is a road, some fields, farmhouses with the paint gone, and the truck that grinds along behind with rifles pointed at the walkers’ backs. The spectators, when there are any, stand at the verge and stare. Nobody cheers.
The first shooting comes early. It is a boy called Curly (Roman Griffin Davis), and his crime is a cramp. Lawrence does not cut away and Willems does not soften it, and we flinched, hard. What stayed with us was how much less we flinched at the next one, and less again at the one after that, and that the film had counted on this. It is the closest the film comes to making an argument, and it makes it without a word of dialogue.
Hoffman plays Garraty as a boy who arrived with a grievance and a plan and keeps both to himself for as long as he can. He does not act tired; he lets his stride shorten. David Jonsson’s McVries has decided that the only sane response to the walk is to make a friend, and he sets about it with a cheerfulness that Jonsson lets crack only when nobody else is looking. Their talk, about mothers and girls and what they would do with the prize and whether any of it is worth it, is the film. Ben Wang’s Hank Olson supplies the jokes and then stops supplying them, and the quiet where they used to be is among the film’s best effects. Charlie Plummer’s Barkovitch needles everyone within earshot, and Plummer makes him pitiable without making him likeable.
Mark Hamill’s Major, in aviator glasses and a growl, tells the boys that they are weak because the country is weak, and the film wants him both frightening and a joke. He is neither for long. JT Mollner’s script, working from Stephen King’s first novel, gives the boys a great deal to say about death, and in the middle hour the sayings start to sound like each other. Mark Yoshikawa and Peggy Eghbalian cut the shootings short and sharp and let the conversations run, which is the right choice, but at 108 minutes we felt each of them, and not always in the way intended. Jeremiah Fraites’s score is piano and low strings, and it tells us when to be sad slightly before the actors have.
The last stretch makes a choice the book does not, and we will not describe it. We can say that it is the one point where the film stops trusting the road and reaches for something larger, and we came out arguing about whether it had earned it. We can also say that the film keeps its nerve about the shootings to the end, which is more than we expected from a studio picture with a 15 certificate.
Set beside Lawrence’s own Hunger Games films, there is no arena, no capital, no costumes; the whole spectacle is a road and a truck. It is the more honest film for it and the smaller one. Set beside Stephen King adaptations generally, it sits well above the middle, mostly because two actors in their twenties make a two-hour conversation feel like it might be interrupted at any moment, and often is.
Do not watch it over dinner. Watch it with someone who will want to argue about the last ten minutes, because you will.
