DAN WEBSTER:
It’s all the fashion these days to rank things. Fans of Cracker Barrel, for example, can go to the website Mashed.com and find the franchise’s “Best Menu Items — Ranked and Reviewed.”
Spoiler alert: coming in at No. 1 is Pot Roast, which the reviewer says is a “tender” dish that “feels the most representative of the vibe that Cracker Barrel puts out: homey, rich, and cozy meals to share with the whole family.”
Delivering the right vibe, to borrow a phrase, is important. That’s true of anything worth critiquing, but it’s especially relevant for movies. Consider Time magazine’s recent ranking of “The 20 Best Stephen King Adaptations.” Second spoiler alert: Time’s top choice is Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 version of King’s novel The Shining, which the reviewer praised as Kubrick's “profound […] mastery of mood and anxiously eerie tone.”
Reflecting the ever-present connection between business and art, each week outlets such as Variety report box-office earnings. And the results suggest a ranking in which that those films that don’t earn what was expected are, plainly stated, losers.
The latest of King’s works to be so judged is Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of The Long Walk, a novel published in 1979 under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman. Lawrence’s film is already considered an underachiever, having earned on its opening weekend only $11.5 million, placing it fourth among Friday’s premieres. But this presumed failing comes as no real surprise.
In The Long Walk, Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) stars as Ray Garraty, one of 50 young men—each from a different state—chosen by lottery to compete in the annual Long Walk. In reality, though, it’s less a competition than it is a test of survival.
Garraty and the others, you see, live in a dystopian world, one in which the U.S. has been humbled by war. It’s not clear who won the conflict, but what is clear is that the country now is controlled by an authoritarian regime, and that universal poverty and a sense of hopelessness have swept the land.
So, explains a character overseeing the event who is referred to as "The Major" (played by an unrecognizable Mark Hamill), The Long Walk is designed to get the country back on its feet. And it’s supposed to do so by using the boys’ efforts to inspire citizens not to be lazy but to show spirit and work harder.
The parameters of the event are simple—all 50 start out together and they walk, maintaining a 3-mile-an-hour pace, until only one is left standing. The winner takes home a monetary prize and can have his greatest wish granted. The bad news? Those who fall below the pace, who for any reason can’t go on or who try to escape, are shot dead. There can be only one winner.
That threat can’t stop some of them from bonding. These are boys, after all. Garraty makes friends with Peter McVries (played by David Johsson), and the two of them become “musketeers” with Arthur Baker (played by Tut Nyout) and Hank Olson (played by Ben Yang). Among all actors making appearances, some are more notable than others and yet all fill stereotypical roles.
Garraty and McVries are the nice guys, equivalent to the duo Will Wheaton and River Phoenix played in the 1986 King adaptation Stand By Me. Olson is the perky runt, Barkovitch (played by Charlie Plummer) is the troublemaker and Stebbins (played by Garrett Wareing) is the loner with a secret.
As he has shown before, mainly having helmed four of the five Hunger Games films, Lawrence is a sufficiently competent director. And the acting is uniformly decent, although one of the best performances is given by Judy Greer in what is basically a cameo as Garraty’s mother.
Yet hampered by the limited nature of King’s plodding plotline, Lawrence merely follows the boys as they trudge along, spouting adolescent clichés about ideas they barely understand. We are left, then, merely to guess the order in which they will die and who will emerge as the winner.
In Cracker Barrel parlance, that’s not the kind of homey, rich and cozy vibe you’d choose to share—at least not with your whole family.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.