The Long Walk

No Golden Wonders

The Long Walk
Directed by Francis Lawrence
USA 2025
Lionsgate
UK cinema release print

Warning: I originally intended to write this review without spoilers but, so many thick headed websites have completely failed to catch on to anything but the lowest common denominator, surface interpretation of the ending that I’m going to have to address it here in a special spoiler section at the end... so don’t read past that if you don’t want to know. Watch the movie first and then, maybe, come back to me. 

I first read The Long Walk in a collection of four novels called The Bachman Books back in 1985. I would have been 17 years old and I remember thinking to myself that, now that Richard Bachman had just been outed as being a pen name of Stephen King, then somebody’s bound to make this one into a movie soon, right? It was a nice little story and I knew it would surely lend itself to a decent, cinematic interpretation.

Well, it looks like I had to wait 40 years for that to happen but it’s finally here. And I was already going to see this but, about a month ago, I was fortunate enough to be sitting in a screening of a movie at FrightFest (I forget which one), when they did a sneak preview of the first reel of this movie. Basically the first 22 minutes or so... up to and including the first ‘kill’ of the movie. Bad for the movie this preview played with because, it blew the other movie out of the water. So I was definitely up for seeing this as soon as it hit my local cinema.

And, yes, the wait was worth it because director Francis Lawrence has brought one of the year’s best movies to the screen. It deviates very slightly from what I can remember of the novel but, it makes a beautiful companion piece and the ending, which people seem to be almost deliberately misinterpreting on professional websites, is absolutely brilliant. I mean, come on guys... sometimes a film isn’t about what’s immediately on the surface. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Okay, so the basic premise of The Long Walk is this. In a dystopian future, young male adults all sign up for The Long Walk once a year and, by lottery, 50 people are selected. It’s a public demonstration of giving a devastated population a regard for a good work ethic and to give people a chance of hope, if they happen to survive. They then have to walk for as long as they can, not letting their speed drop below three miles an hour over a number of days. If they drop the speed they are given a ten second warning, then two more whereby, if they still can’t carry on at that speed (due to thier foot being broken or some other issue, plus of course exhaustion), they are shot in the head. When there is only one survivor left, the walk stops and they are given a huge, life changing cash prize and are granted one wish. 

The film follows the walkers (not the crisps) as they talk and discuss and just walk for almost two hours of movie, periodically getting shot dead and going through all kinds of harsh weather without once being allowed to rest. 

There are two male leads in this. Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour) plays Raymond Garraty, contestant number 47 and the always brilliant David Jonsson plays Peter McVries, contestant number 23, with the film focussing on their growing friendship and revealing background on their characters as the walk progresses. Egged on by the human representation of the villainy of the piece, The Major, played chillingly by the great Mark Hamill.

And it’s brilliant and, maybe not quite brutal as many critics have called it but certainly a little gruelling (and occasionally gory, such as a scene involving some tank tracks from the vehicles which constantly follow the walkers, carrying the military who are going to pop out and shoot them dead when the time comes). The whole thing is very suspenseful and I can’t help but think that Alfred Hitchcock would even have appreciated this one, to an extent. 

All this and a really great score by composer Jeremiah Fraites which helps build the tension nicely, using almost minimalist ostinatos interspersed with beautiful, poignant melodies at key points... so of course there’s no proper CD release of this at time of writing. And then there’s the ending...

Okay, this is spoilers now, don’t read past here until you’ve seen the movie...

The final two left in the walk by the end of the tale are Garraty and McVries, who have built a solid friendship and are moved by each other’s stories of why they want to win the money and the wish for and what they would do with said wish once they get it. Garraty wants to ask for one of the carbines the military are carrying as his wish, so he can shoot The Major dead there and then because of something which has happened to him in his past. So McVries deliberately stops so Garraty can win but, Garraty goes back for him and gets him moving again, with the two of them both on their final warning (next stop is instant death)... and once Garraty gets McVries interested in carrying on, he lets him get ahead and just stops so that McVries can win... without him at first realising what has happened. So he makes Garraty’s wish come true, gets the carbine and kills The Major for him. Then, with the crowd of spectators and all the military just suddenly vanished for no apparent reason, he just carries on walking into the sunset (so to speak). And people have been reporting this as some kind of demonstration that Garraty is the one actually left standing. 

Because that’s what they see without thinking about why they are seeing the ending done in this poetic, almost dream like manner, I guess. 

Um... nope. 

I don’t think McVries survived at all. It’s made pretty clear that if he kills the major, he’ll be shot dead by the military looking on in front of the huge crowd of walk supporters gathered to see the finish. And then they just all are suddenly not there? No, I think it’s obvious by this point that McVries is already dead and this is what happened in his dead mind’s view of events. I think that he either didn’t get successfully saved by Garraty when he tried to sacrifice himself or... maybe he did but as soon as he killed The Major he was shot dead too. He may not realise it yet but, either way, he’s dead. It’s the only explanation for the way the last shot of the movie plays out, I reckon.

Does this make The Long Walk this year’s Saint Maud (reviewed here) in terms of ending interpretations... well, yeah, maybe. I don’t know why people aren’t picking up on this stuff because, to me it’s obvious but, either way, there are no happy endings here. The film is a relentless machine of suspense and so earns my respect and admiration, with that dream state ending just being the cherry on top of the cake, as far as I’m concerned. 

And if that isn’t a recommendation for The Long Walk then I don’t know what is. This one is absolutely phenomenal and I hope it does huge at the box office (although my local Cineworld stupidly showed it in the smallest screen they had... that’s just silly). Definitely catch this one with a cinema full of people... you will, eventually, hear more than just a pin drop. 

Red Sparrow

Nate N’ Sparrow

Red Sparrow
2018 USA Directed by Francis Lawrence
UK cinema release print.

Red Sparrow is a Cold War spy thriller based on a novel, the first part of a trilogy, by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews. So I guess you can certainly say the writer of the source material knows where he’s coming from in terms of the nuts and bolts operating procedures used in the story and this certainly, I think, comes through in the filmed version.

Now before I go any further, I have to say that I went into this movie knowing it was pre-cut for release in the UK... which is something I almost never humour or entertain. However, the trailer really intrigued me so I made one of my rare ‘window shopping only’ cinema trips. If I liked this ‘selected highlights’ version of the movie then I would buy the full, uncut version from the US market when it comes out on Blu Ray. Which I will be doing, as it happens. However, I really wouldn’t consider the UK presentation the same as being able to actually watch the movie itself. Why? Because I consider even a single frame (one 24th of a second) excised from a movie to be an incomplete edition and not the full work of art. I remember well the old late 1980s TV showings of Blade Runner (reviewed here) where, just the removal of one single swear word totally changed the underlying atmosphere of a specific scene and gave a different emotional hit from it. So... no... watching a movie with cuts is not the same as watching the actual film and I’m both ashamed and offended that censors in this day and age still exist. And I am certainly not giving any respect to the studio who released this and allowed it to be cut just to get a lower rating. Forget the money, guys, it’s about the art... let it lose money, it’s not that important. Art is more important. Entertainment is art and art is not a business. I know that’s a totally naive and less than credible thing to say about the Hollywood money machine but I don’t care... unless we strive to reach that ideal then we’ll never, ever get there.

So anyway... Red Sparrow is not the film I was expecting it to be.

It looked, from the trailer, like an edgier version of the film the Marvel Black Widow movie... if that ever sees the light of day... should be but, although it certainly is edgier than I would imagine Marvel would let their Natasha film be, this one isn’t an ‘action’ thriller by any sense of the expression and if you’re looking for a ‘high octane’ guns and explosions kind of movie, you’re definitely in the wrong place.

This film is actually a proper spy thriller.

It has an edge to it for sure but it’s more like a brutal version of something that John Le Carre or Len Deighton might have written so, oh yeah, I’m definitely a big fan of this film (or what little I saw of it... one of the cuts made is clumsy and obvious so I'm looking forward to seeing the ‘Jean Rollinesque’ pay-off to a certain, early sequence in the film).

Jennifer Lawrence is an actress who impresses me more and more with every film I see her in. I didn’t see her Hunger Games films by the same director (who is no relation to her, despite the surname) because the Young Adult nature of the source material put me off but everything I have seen her in, I have sat up and taken note. I hated Aronofsky’s Mother! (reviewed here) for example but, even in that, you can see what a great and dedicated performer she is and my respect for her deepens with Red Sparrow because, well, it’s a really brave part to take on and she really runs with it. Considering you have some real acting heavyweights in the cinematic ring with her on this one, such as Jeremy Irons and Charlotte Rampling, she does a really good job and more than holds her own. Watching her career now with a lot of interest.

The film is about her character, Dominika Egorova, once a world famous ballet star but now recruited, due to circumstances I won’t spoil here (even though they’re on the trailer), to the secret government division of agents code named the Red Sparrows. It’s specifically about a plot concerning US intelligence operative Nate Nash (played by Joel Edgerton) and the identity of a Russian mole he is trying to keep secret. The film tells the story of the grey areas where the lives of these two agents overlap and penetrate each other. It raises the obvious questions about whether Dominika is committed to the Russians or whether she is really helping the Americans and, any weaknesses in the story come, I think, from the writing more than anything else. For instance, there’s a scene where you will definitely find out one way or another, whose side she is on  but I was pretty sure the way it has been set up to make you think the opposite of the truth of the situation was, in itself, giving the game away. Another slightly problematic thing is the identity of the mole, who I was pretty sure I had guessed correctly from the outset and when the reveal came later... again, it was the obvious choice. That being said, there is a nice bit of shenanigans with that character right near the end of the film where Dominika pulls her own trump card which is a moment I didn’t quite see coming... although it makes perfect sense with the way the recruitment of her character is pitched at the start of the piece.

However, these little obvious things really don’t stop this movie from being a tight spy thriller and I really enjoyed this one a lot more than some of the other, recent attempts to juggle the expectations of ‘action thriller’ as opposed to ‘spy thriller’ in modern cinema. There’s also some really great stuff going on with the way the film is put together too... asides from the nude scenes with Jennifer Lawrence which, of course, are already leading this movie into ‘great’ territory. ;-)

For instance, there are some nice things done with the sound in certain sequences, such as the boiling sound of a whistling kettle transmuting into the squeak of an opening door in the next scene. Also, the crosscutting of the plot set up with Nate and the introduction of Dominika’s character in the pre-credits sequence, long before either of these characters meet in the chronology of the story, is handled really well and could have gone completely wrong but it’s edited very competently and doesn’t lose the atmosphere of two things coming to a simultaneous, mini climax.

Another thing the director seems to like to do is to set up expectations of a sequence by showing you what happens with a different character earlier in the film and then upending that expectation the second time around. Such as showing the presence of another character’s nasty demise in a similar situation before leading up to it again with a slightly different denouement. This is something which another great spy thriller, The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed by me here), does in its opening phone booth sequence, setting the audience up for a similar moment much later in the film. In Red Sparrow, this technique almost takes on metatextual proportions when one of the characters uses a video of a sequence to deliberately foreshadow the possibilities of ‘what comes next’ to one of the other characters in an interrogations scene. So the film really wears its foreshadowing on its sleeve here and demonstrates an awareness of how those same, subconscious tricks used on the audience can also be brought into play in the context of the movie itself.

Another thing which got me into the cinema to see this was the promise of a new James Newton Howard score. This composer has grown on me over the years and my appreciation increased after I saw a London concert last year. This isn’t, as I’d initially expected, in the same kind of mode as his excellent score for Salt (movie reviewed here) but is a much slower score with a lot of Russian flourishes (or possibly the Westernised perception of Russian musical phrases) peppered into the mix. I suspect it will take me a few stand alone listens to fully get into but it will be getting a proper CD release at the end of the month so I will, at least, get a chance. There’s some stuff in it, especially in a later scene where Dominika meets Nate in his apartment, which plays out like something Bernard Herrmann might have written for it so, yeah, definitely looking forward to the physical release and it certainly works in the context of the movie itself.

The film has a wonderfully ambiguous ending too. I am in no way spoiling it but, now that I know the source material is a trilogy of novels it certainly makes more sense that things aren’t so ‘spelled out’ for the audience and I can only hope (although somehow doubt) that the director and actors reunite for two sequels. Time will tell, I guess.

Red Sparrow is definitely a solid recommendation from me, especially to fans of spy movies which don’t just limit themselves to the action packed confections of the James Bond or Jason Bourne movies. A proper espionage thriller with a very cold sting to it and something which deserves to do a lot better at the box office than I expect it to. Absolutely go and see this one because it’s rare these days that movies like this are let out the gate, so to speak. Stupid plot holes for sure (like how can a world famous ballerina go under cover by dying her hair blonde?) but a top notch thriller, nonetheless.