Footsteps: "The Long Walk"

Last month's The Life of Chuck may have caused some fear that Stephen King, and movies based on Stephen King, had gone soft; after that sappy spiritual footnote, The Long Walk presents as a full-bodied reunion with the author's dark side. What this new film posits is that at some point in the not too distant future, to boost America's spirits and productivity amid an ongoing financial crisis, each state will send a young man to compete in an extreme sports event: a non-stop, march-or-die hike in which participants must maintain a ruthless three-miles-an-hour pace or risk being gunned down on the spot. As in race walking, there's a rudimentary system of warnings in place before final disqualification, but basically whosoever stays upright the longest will be the winner, and the recipient of a cash prize that ensures they'll never again have to do a day's work (or walk). Instead of The Running Man (itself set for the Edgar Wright treatment in the weeks ahead), here, then, are the walking boys. Our entry point is straight-up, corn-fed Raymond Garrity (Cooper Hoffman), introduced getting an understandably teary send-off from mum Judy Greer. Yet Garrity soon bonds with relaxed joker Peter McVries (David Jonsson), and there are also nerdy walkers, Southern walkers, long-haired non-conformist walkers - constantly surveilled and tailed, with no allowances granted for untied laces, pebbles in shoes, muscle cramps or toilet breaks - plus a selection of obvious makeweights whose early demise serves as dire warning to the others. In other respects, The Long Walk may have shown up at exactly the worst time: you do worry it'll give Stephen Miller and his merry band ideas, should this White House get a night off from flushing America down the plughole.

The director is Francis Lawrence, who made his money overseeing the Hunger Games movies, and this does look as though Lionsgate has asked him to target boys with much the same kind of project as he previously targeted girls: a medium-lowish budget genre movie that makes multiplex entertainment out of the strictures of fascism. Like its smash-hit predecessors, The Long Walk doesn't look like much. The budget ensures it can't travel too far or wide, so the scenery throughout remains more or less the same: a bikeless peloton of young actors, trudging, always trudging, like runners on a treadmill or hamsters on a wheel. But this is by far the better story: always moving forward, where its multipart predecessor got sidetracked and waylaid by subplots and flashbacks. The relative simplicity of this set-up refocuses our attention on the walking dead: a platoon of brothers-in-arms (or legs), nudging one another along, sometimes holding each other up. Personalities are revealed en route; antagonisms spark up, as does a kind of camaraderie. Once you get past how walky it is, we're forced to consider how talky it is, yet Lawrence did well to cast performers as naturally garrulous as Hoffman and Jonsson, this movie's Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (or David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah, if you're walking Rye Lane way). In the lighter stretches of JT Mollner's script, they talk about what they want from this walk and this world; gradually, however, they're forced to confront the issue of how much change they can really effectuate within this crushing and unjust system, which is a surprising conversation to happen across in screen 7 of the Cineworld.

The lingering heartbreak hanging over these 108 minutes is knowing that, at best, only one of this boyish platoon will survive; Mollner and Lawrence's task is to nudge these boys along while taking care to preserve the particular perversity at the heart of King's project. (Everybody - or near enough everybody - dies.) In some ways, The Long Walk seems to resume where The Life of Chuck's intriguing first act paused before the nosedive into terminal sentimentality: you can imagine a competition like this running in the background of that movie's endtimes, spooking as many spectators as it enthralled. The new film's strengths and weaknesses turn out to be bound up with its production context. Inevitably, the carnage is not as gleefully, vividly scuzzy as any straight-to-DVD adaptation of this story might have been, but as a standalone venture from what's effectively an indie studio, this Long Walk also isn't anything like as bland or cushioned as a more mainstream endeavour would be. (It's certainly never as bland or cushioned as the Hunger Games movies were, although they were targeting a pre-existing audience and blockbuster status besides.) It will do almost zero repeat business as a result, and I'd be surprised indeed if it turns out to be a franchise starter: there'll be no The Long Walk 2: Walk Harder at the end of this road. Yet there's something admirable about the way this version sticks to its guns and delivers what King's billing and that title on the poster promises. Perhaps it took the threat of actual fascism taking hold in America for these YA nightmares to toughen up and get serious, but Lawrence's film does feel like a judiciously placed step in the right direction.

The Long Walk opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.