Rating: R | Runtime: 108 minutes
Release Date: September 12th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Lionsgate
Director(s): Francis Lawrence
Writer(s): JT Mollner / Stephen King (novel, as Richard Bachman)

Vengeance is not enough.

Last I checked, Stephen King wrote The Long Walk well before both The Hunger Games and Battle Royale debuted. So, how come Quentin Tarantino doesn’t have anything to say about that? Hell, Francis Lawrence surely saw the connection and grinned all the way to the bank after signing his contract.

This goes a lot harder than I expected thanks to a stellar ensemble led by David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman (but definitely does not also end with them). I think the script fails to really hit the messaging hard enough for the ending to work beyond its abruptness and the convenient narrative connections do feel like a twenty-something author’s first novel, but the introspective conversations had throughout also show the genius King was cultivating.

Sometimes it’s nice to just let the mythology behind a dystopia serve as a backdrop for a tale of brotherly love that reminds us empathy and camaraderie are the truest form of rebellion against an authoritarian regime whose only hope to maintain control is by fostering a selfish individualism in its victims that asks them to subjugate themselves.

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Joshua Odjick as Parker, Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness, David Jonsson as McVries, Cooper Hoffman as Garraty, and Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch in THE LONG WALK. Photo Credit: Murray Close/Lionsgate.