Rent The Long Walk (2025)

Keep Walking, Keep Watching: King’s Warning - The Long Walk review by griggs

Picture the setup: near-fascist America turns adolescent misery into primetime entertainment, and the only rule is keep walking. Not a metaphor, not a motivational slogan — a commandment. The really creepy bit is that Stephen King cooked the idea up at university in the late ’60s, and here we are, decades later, treating it like a handy bit of fiction rather than a public service announcement.

But the film’s been marketed to death. The trailer doesn’t tease; it summarises. So the first stretch can’t build much dread, because you already know the route. Once the premise is established, the middle portion starts to repeat itself: warning, stumble, calculation, cruelty, rinse, repeat. That might be the point — systems are monotonous, brutality is boring — but cinema still needs rhythm, not just mechanism.

There are compensations. David Jonsson walks in with real screen electricity — the sort you can’t fake, the sort casting directors go feral for. Cooper Hoffman… I’m less sold. He’s fine, but he doesn’t quite anchor the thing the way it needs. Still, the friendship does register, which matters, because without that human thread it’s just a treadmill with bullets. And yes, Mark Hamill turns up, and if you don’t spot him straight away you’ll feel mildly foolish.I did.

The ending arrives and… sort of sits down. It isn’t outrageously bad, it’s just dutiful. Yet any “satisfying” alternative would be a cheat. This is a story about a machine. Machines don’t do catharsis. They do output.