The Long Walk (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
Sep 9
5 min read

THE LONG WALK (2025)

Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Jordan Gonzalez, Josh Hamilton, Judy Greer, Mark Hamill, Noah de Mel, Daymon Wrightly, Jack Giffin, Thamela Mpumlwana, Keenan Lehmann, Dale Neri, Teagan Stark, Sam Clark and Emmanuel Oderemi.

Screenplay by JT Mollner.

Directed by Francis Lawrence.

Distributed by Lionsgate. 108 minutes. Rated R.

Stephen King has always been a shockingly prolific writer. In a career which has lasted just over 50 years, he has written nearly 70 novels, as well as multiple collections of novellas and short stories, many screenplays and teleplays, several non-fiction works, many articles, some children’s books, even some plays.

In fact, in the early years of his career, just as he was breaking out as a horror novelist and writing some of his most classic books, this fruitfulness was a bit of an issue for him. King had multiple manuscripts that were ready for release, but his publishing house strongly felt that he should not put out more than a book a year, for fear of overwhelming the market and tarnishing his brand.

King understood that, yet he didn’t want to just sit on the finished novels he had, some of which were written before he was a published author, others of which just didn’t quite fit into his body of work. And thus Richard Bachman was born.

Richard Bachman was a pseudonym and an experiment for King – who had luckily at that point gotten enough power in publishing that he could pull it off. Richard Bachman had a complete complicated bio for his life, even a fake author’s photo for the books. (It was a friend of King’s agent.) King specified that the books be released with little fanfare or promotion, just to see what would happen, how his fiction would sell without his brand name attached.

The first Bachman book was Rage, which was released in 1977 – the same year as King published The Shining. (Rage went on to be the only King book which the author voluntarily removed from print, because it’s story about a high school shooter ended up being horrifyingly prescient and seemed to have even inspired a real-life mass shooting.) The second Bachman book was The Long Walk, which came out in between The Stand and The Dead Zone. By 1984 he had also released the Bachman books Road Work, The Running Man and Thinner. All five books were moderate sellers at best.

It was during the release of Thinner that the gig was up for Bachman. A reporter noted that Bachman’s writing style was extremely similar to King’s and looked into their origins, eventually finding the smoking gun that King was indeed Bachman through the Library of Congress. King fessed up, and these five books which had flown pretty much under the radar became big hits. (King republished the first four books as a collection entitled The Bachman Books.) Then his pseudonym was mostly retired – he was even given a fictional death – although a couple of times in later years King released “lost” Bachman manuscripts, Desperation (1996) and Blaze (2007), to bring the total to seven books.

The Bachman books have never gotten complete respect in the King community – in fact, I have read nearly everything King has written, but I never have gotten around to reading the last two Bachman books.

Just like life in general, King’s Bachman books have had a lesser ride on film than his other books. As an author, nearly every story King put his name to was adapted to film or television – often multiple times. Yet the Bachman books have not really held much interest for filmmakers. The best-known adaptation of a Bachman book was the hit 1987 Arnold Schwartzenegger film The Running Man, but that was a very loose version of the book. There was also a quickly-forgotten version of Thinner made in 1996 and Desperation was turned into a TV movie in 2006.

However, it seems that 2025 is the year of Bachman books in Hollywood. Coming soon is a new reboot of The Running Man, which supposedly will be somewhat closer to the book’s narrative. Beating that one out of the gates is this version of the second Bachman book, The Long Walk. Of course, in The Long Walk they do downplay the Bachman connection. In fact, in the credits for the film it says it is “based on the novel by Stephen King.” That’s a far cry from the original Running Man film, where although King had been outed as Bachman a few years earlier, Bachman’s name was the only one used in the credits.

Now I’ll admit that I read The Long Walk decades ago in the Bachman Books compilation, and it was one of the books under that name that made more of an impression on me than some of the others. (For example, I have no memory whatsoever about Roadwork.) Still, I only had a broad memory of what happened in the book going into the screening for The Long Walk.

The storyline of The Long Walk is brilliant in its simplicity and horror. In a post-Apocalyptic America, there is an annual contest called the Long Walk, which has become a television event. Essentially, it is a marathon in which dozens of young men must walk across the countryside for hundreds of miles. They are not allowed to stop. They are not allowed to sleep. They are not allowed to even slow down to a pace of under three miles an hour. If they do, they are given a warning. If they reach three warnings, they will be shot.

They have to keep walking indefinitely, until there is just one man standing, who will supposedly be rewarded with untold riches. It’s a brilliant, horrifying idea, made all the scarier because the physical and mental torture the walkers experience seemed completely bonkers when the novel was originally written in 1979, but it is shockingly and sadly a somewhat realistic concept in the modern world of reality television and obsessive celebrity worship.

We get to know and care about a few dozen young men as they negotiate the walk, and as they are one-by-one taken out. It’s mighty depressing, but it is a truly chilling look at modern society. (The Long Walk will occasionally get vaguely political, but mostly it’s a sociological look at humans as a race, for better or worse.)

You wouldn’t think that a bunch of young men walking and talking on screen for nearly two hours would make for a gripping viewing experience, but it really does. The film is somewhat devastating and makes me want to dig out the original book.

Jay S. Jacobs