Movie Review

Early Stephen King novel The Long Walk is a movie with a modern-day message

Cast of The Long Walk, including stars Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson (center).

Photo by Murray Close/Lionsgate

2025 has been an impressively prolific year as far as Stephen King adaptations go. The year has already brought the horror film The Monkey (based on a 1980 short story) and the sentimental The Life of Chuck (based on a 2020 short story). Now comes The Long Walk, another film that digs deep into King’s prolific archive, with the original book (under King's pseudonym, Richard Bachman) coming out in 1979.

In the world of the film, young men from all 50 states volunteer for a lottery to compete in a competition called The Long Walk for a chance to win a large cash prize. The catch is it’s not a race, but rather a feat of endurance, as every participant must maintain a speed of at least 3 miles per hour until only one person remains. Those who are unable to do so are given a series of three warnings until they are brutally shot.

Among the participants are Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), who happens to come from the state where the competition starts; Peter McVries (David Jonsson), an affable and confident guy; Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), who seems to antagonize everybody he meets; and Hank Olson (Ben Wang), a mouthy kid who teams up with Raymond and Peter. All the while, the group is urged on by The Major (Mark Hamill), who seems to take great pleasure in their suffering.

Directed by Francis Lawrence and written by JT Mollner, the film mostly consists of conversations between the participants in the competition, with the occasional killing underscoring the intensity of what they’re doing. Much of the dialogue is between Raymond and Peter, who become fast friends and share thoughts that are both practical and philosophical. The walk literally never stops, so there’s a natural propulsiveness to the story even during scenes that feature nothing but talking.

The details of the story can be a tad confusing, though. The film is clearly set at some point in the mid-20th century, as all of the vehicles come from that era and the young men all wear clothes and shoes that are far from modern. But they also live in a dystopian, financially-strapped world where every young man feels he has no choice but to enter a lottery for a competition in which he will most likely die. The alternate universe reality takes some time to get used to.

Lawrence, who has directed every Hunger Games film, is right at home pitting a group of young people against each other in a televised spectacle that can feature graphic violence. If you so choose, the film is easy to read as a commentary on the current state of the world, where the themes of the story lie closer to reality than perhaps even King could predict.

In a short career that has included films like Licorice Pizza and Saturday Night, Hoffman has already proved himself as a worthy successor to his late father, Philip Seymour Hoffman. He has a natural empathy in his acting that draws you in, and a talent that pulls the most out of every line. Jonsson is his equal and perhaps even more compelling here, as the English actor uses a mumbly voice and squinty face to great effect.

There’s not much to The Long Walk other than walking, talking, and killing, but it still makes for an intense experience that rises above its simplicity. It’s difficult to classify a film like this as “entertainment,” but the performances of Hoffman, Jonsson, and others make it a great watch despite the cruelty.

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The Long Walk opens in theaters on September 12.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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