The Long Walk (2025)

I'm not saying I'm ancient, but I'm old enough to have read The Bachman Books before Rage was excluded from the collection by Stephen King. It was a pretty great read. Four novellas written by Stephen King, under the name Richard Bachman, between the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The highlight was The Long Walk though, and it's something that fans of King's work wanted to see turned into a movie for decades. Here we are then, but is it any good?

The short answer to that is yes.

The premise is simple enough. America seems to have slid into some kind of horrible totalitarianism, with culture and free thought frowned upon as everyone struggles to make ends meet. This leaves many desperate enough to nominate themselves for a place in the annual event known as The Long Walk. The participants are all teenage boys, one from each state. All they have to do is walk at a constant speed of at least 3 miles per hour. That may sound okay to you, but they get three warnings if they fall below that speed, and then a bullet. There are no toilet breaks, no rest periods, no relief from pain, just walking. Always walking. Until there's only one left. The winner, who will receive a huge sum of money and one wish granted. Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) thinks he has a chance, and knows exactly what he wants his one wish to be. Peter McVries (David Jonsson) seems to be a good ally during the contest, but both young men need to remember that only one can survive to the end. Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer) remembers this, and tries to goad others into wasting some of their energy, Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) looks like a very strong contender, and others trying to stay on their feet include Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot), Hank Olson (Ben Wang), Collie Parker (Joshua Odjick), and Thomas Curley (Roman Griffin Davis). 

Adapted from page to screen by JT Mollner, The Long Walk is directed well by Francis Lawrence (best known for helming a number of other movies about a deadly competition, a note that everyone is obliged to mention in any review of this film). There's only so much you can really do with the premise though. This is a film with a lot of conversations happening between people who are walking. It's punctuated by some sudden deaths, and those are sometimes delivered with maximum impact, but it's essentially a lot of walking and talking. Not great cinema, but still a great story nonetheless.

Lawrence has done himself a big favour with his casting. Hoffman does a fantastic job in his lead role, and Jonsson is almost equally good (if slightly hampered by the accent and occasional phrases that make him feel like he's mired in the bog of eternal King-isms). Plummer is even more hampered, but does well, and Wareing, Nyuot, Wang, and co. all do good work, especially when their full journey is shown via stages of physical and mental deterioration. Judy Greer has a couple of scenes that have her fretting over her son (Hoffman), something she does really well, and Mark Hamill is brilliantly cold and jingoistic as The Major, the military figurehead of The Long Walk and the one who will deliver the final shot before the winner is celebrated. 

I did really like this, and it's been good to see many others reacting positively to it, but I can't judge it on purely technical aspects. I think at least some of my reaction stems from finally seeing ANY adaptation of the story in film form. The material is strong enough to make up for any minor failings, and maybe the fact that it is here for us in 2025 will help us avoid making a reality that comes all too close to this kind of fiction. Or maybe we're all just too tired and befuddled to do anything other than keep walking toward a depressingly bleak future. 

8/10

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Moonfall (2022)

Despite strong competition from a couple of other blockbusters from the past decade or so, including at least one other film also from director Roland Emmerich, Moonfall is the dumbest mainstream release you will see this year, and perhaps even the dumbest mainstream movie you will ever see. It is so dumb that it at least makes it easier to forget about following the plot and just concentrate on the spectacle of the whole thing. In fact, I think it might be dangerous to try keeping your brain fully switched on while watching this.

Basically, in the way of almost all Emmerich movies, something happens at the start that teases the mass devastation due to come along later in the movie. The very basic premise is, as the title tells you, the moon changing orbit. Earth has about three weeks to figure out a solution. The only hope for humanity lies with Jocinda Fowler (a top bod at NASA, played by Halle Berry), Brian Harper (a disgraced ex-astronaut, played by Patrick Wilson), and KC Houseman (an amateur . . . skywatcher, a label I will use to avoid spoilers, played by John Bradley). Meanwhile, tsunamis start destroying major cities, gravity is changing, and people seem remarkably unconcerned about the threat of super-werewolves.

Co-written by Emmerich, Harald Kloser, and Spenser Cohen, here is a film that almost gets things so right, but ultimately ruins the third act with an overdose of CGI madness that makes it genuinely hard to see, or even know, what is going on. The fun ideas set up in the opening act become less fun as things met become more relentless. And there are only so many times you can look at a supermoon in the sky before it becomes worthy of little more than a shrug (once, one time is all you need).

Emmerich can direct this kind of stuff in his sleep, but he seems to get very easily distracted by the toys at his disposal. He is a man who doesn’t believe in “less is more”. More is more, and more on top of that, and even more. It’s tiring, especially by the time you get to a final act that manages to be overlong and surprisingly unsatisfying.

The cast do what is asked of them, and their performances are in line with the material. Berry comes out of it best, having to be the level-headed lead of the mission, and Wilson tries hard, despite being weighed down by the many clichés that he’s given (washed up, no money, a beer in the morning, a son he hasn’t always been as close to). Bradley is a mixture of comic relief and Mr. Exposition, he does well enough in his role, but his character is an odd one to turn into a hero, for obvious reasons. Charlie Plummer plays the son of Wilson’s character, Michael Peña is the stepfather you suspect may end up moonstruck to pave the way for a reconnection between Wilson and Carolina Bartczak (as his ex-wife), and Wenwen Yu is absolutely wasted in a role that feels horribly undefined.

If you need something that will provide spectacle without taxing your brain then this might just fit the bill. Personally, I would recommend (re)watching past glories, pick from either the fantastic The Day After Tomorrow or the silliness of 2012. Pick Independence Day (not exactly the same kind of movie, but the template is similar enough). This isn’t as good as any of those. But it still isn’t as bad as Geostorm.

5/10

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Spontaneous (2020)

Written and directed by Brian Duffield, adapting a novel by Aaron Starmer, Spontaneous is the kind of good-natured film that should immediately make you a fan of those involved, both behind and in front of the camera. It's a great teen movie, easily sitting alongside the best of that sub-genre, and it just happens to involve a lot of spontaneous combustion.

Katherine Langford plays Mara, a cool schoolgirl who manages to stand out from the crowd without going into full quirky mode. She's good friends with Tess (Hayley Law), and the two of them seem to be happy wandering through their teen years. And then their classmates and peers start to explode. There doesn't seem to be any detectable cause, and no rhyme or reason to it. With the possibility of an early death now looking likely, Dylan (Charlie Plummer) decides to tell Mara that he has a crush on her, and has done for a while. They don't know how much time they have so they may as well enjoy some of it together.

Although he's been writing movies for almost a decade now, this is the directorial debut from Duffield, and it's a very confident one. He's helped himself immensely by casting it so well, but there's also a great balance throughout the script, blending the absurd humour of the situation with the deeper thoughts it prompts in the minds of the lead characters. It also includes some enjoyable movie references without resorting to having certain characters define themselves by dropping famous quotes in every other sentence (an error that so many other movies make when the writer wants to show how cine-literate they are).

Langford and Plummer pair up well, but it's Langford who carries more of the movie on her shoulders, being the individual in more scenes and discussing more of the unfolding situation with the voiceover provided to viewers. It's a star turn, and Langford is surely destined for even more great things in her future career path (if there's any justice). Law does well in her role, although she doesn't get to have as much fun as either Piper Perabo and Rob Huebel (playing Mara's parents). She also doesn't even get to have as much fun as Yvonne Orji, playing Agent Rosetti. I don't mean that Perabo, Huebel, and Orji are adding lots of laughs with their moments, but the way in which their characters are connected to Mara allows them to be involved in some interesting, sometimes supportive and sometimes confrontational, conversations.

Not a gore-filled splatter flick, the spontaneous combustions themselves are often allowed to happen just off-camera, with lots of blood then thrown all over people in close vicinity. Don't seek this out if you're after a horror comedy, but also don't seek it out if you prefer your films to be cosy and bloodless. It does what it needs to do in order to show how shocking the deaths are.

The more I think about Spontaneous, the more I like it. And the title is given a lot of poignancy once the first few scenes properly set out the premise. Next time you're wanting to make a spontaneous viewing choice you could do a LOT worse that this.

8/10

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Shudder Saturday: The Clovehitch Killer (2018)

Relationships between children and parents can often go through periods of turbulence. Rebellious years, growing pains, suspecting that your father is a serial killer. All of these things can cause some strain. That last issue may be a rare thing indeed, but it is what the lead character here ends up dealing with. 

Charlie Plummer is Tyler, a well-behaved young man who tries to stay on his best behaviour around his parents (Samantha Mathis and Dylan McDermott). His worst behaviour is sneaking out with his dad’s truck to meet a date. Which starts off a horrible chain of events, all because a small pornographic photo is found in the truck. This piques Tyler’s curiosity about the local deaths caused by “the clovehitch killer” (someone so named because of their favoured knot). Tyler teams up with Kassi (Madisen Beaty), a young woman who is slightly obsessed with the case, despite the fact that no murders have been committed in years. Things soon get more worrying when evidence starts to point to Tyler’s dad as the main suspect. 

Boosted considerably by the pairing of a great cast doing some of their best work and a finely-tuned script by Christopher Ford, The Clovehitch Killer is a great slow-burn thriller that sits nicely right in between the believable and the . . . cinematically believable (so not too believable, but there's enough done to help you enjoy and believe it all while things are playing out). Director Duncan Skiles allows everything to be sold by the acting and the structure of the screenplay, and knows when to show more and when to keep things hidden away. Things seem very obvious at certain points, but the twists and turns are all done in a way that allow you to consider how the characters may still find certain things plausible, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Plummer is an excellent young lead, very believable as he starts to lean into some behaviours that his parents would frown upon in his quest to get to a truth he may not really want to accept. Beaty is a great co-star alongside him, a teenager who happily treads her own path, and someone with a very understandable reason for digging deeper into the case of "the clovehitch killer". Mathis and McDermott are both just as good as the younger cast members, and McDermott gives a performance that easily ranks up there with anything else he's done over the years. He's almost unrecognisable at times, and every interaction he has with his family members, and particularly his son, is played absolutely perfectly.

It's a film with very few surprises, and one that could have been made as a short with some adjustments, but this is one of many movies about the journey, rather than the destination. And that journey is a hugely satisfying one, thanks to the efforts of everyone involved. Not flashy, not gory, not exploitative, what you have is simply the result of a group of talented people who all have faith in the material that they're working with. And the end result shows that they were right to have that faith.

8/10

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