Mike Flanagan had said in an interview earlier this year that The Long Walk was going to be “impossible” to adapt. Francis Lawrence has made the impossible possible with this bleak and incredibly brutal adaptation that had me nervous for each and every one of the walkers. 

 

When you begin this journey you can’t help but feel immediately invested in the arcs of so many of these challengers setting off on this trek. With 50 total contestants (brought down from 100 in the source material), we can’t get to know every person on the long walk - but their chances of survival on screen are exactly 1/50 and those odds aren’t grand. The violence is devastating as soon as it begins, the shocking ring of the gunfire and the grotesque visuals that accompany it. 

 

From the new Karate Kid himself, Ben Wang to Charlie Plummer, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot and Joshua Odjick - the entirety of the walkers cast is truly terrific, but Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson’s brotherhood that forms is truly what will stick with you long after. Mark Hamill’s The Major is a menacing presence on screen, displaying a performance that can only be described as maniacal and false to pump up his own ego. The more appearances he has the more the audience leans into hoping for his swift demise. 

 

One of the more crucial and emotional roles in the film goes to Judy Greer’s mother character of Cooper Hoffman’s Garretty. We get a disheartening goodbye at the start of the film, hints at her backstory during the walk and a tear-inducing reconnection with her son that almost made my veins pop from anxiety. Greer is only one screen for a maximum of ten minutes but her presence will never be forgotten as it carries so much weight in the overarching theme that the long walk possesses. 

 

300+ miles of walking we witness on screen, across a vast variety of countryside and towns. You’ll be disgusted, anxious, and heartbroken by the very end, because as the Major states there is “one winner and no finish line”.