THE LONG WALK

Here's the honest tally. THE LONG WALK is built with real craft — Francis Lawrence knows how to sustain dread over a long, grim march, and there are genuine moments of brotherhood, compassion, and sacrifice among the young men forced into this contest. That's worth acknowledging.

But the cost is severe. This is one of the most profane movies in years — nearly 300 obscenities, including well over 200 "f" words — layered onto graphic, blood-spray executions and scenes played for gross-out shock. The story's politics don't even hold together: it gestures at a vague Marxist-humanist critique of class and government tyranny without ever explaining how the contest actually benefits the regime it supposedly serves. And it closes by cheering a young man's violent revenge as a kind of righteous uprising.

Craft can't outweigh that combination for most readers. Skip it.

Ray Garraty leaves his mother behind to enter the Long Walk — an annual contest run by a tyrannical American government in which fifty young men from all fifty states must walk over 200 miles without stopping. Fall behind pace after three warnings, and soldiers shoot you dead. The prize for the sole survivor: a fortune and one wish. As the walk stretches on, Ray forms bonds with a few other contestants, including a young man named Peter whose grit and empathy steady him through the growing horror. That's as far as the road takes us here.

Three stars means this is solidly made filmmaking wrapped around troubling material. The film sustains tension across its long march and finds real, affecting moments of camaraderie and sacrifice among the contestants — the brotherhood that forms under pressure is the story's best instinct. The ensemble includes at least one recognizable star in a transformed, hard-to-recognize role, a sign of real commitment to the material.

Where it falters is coherence. The film never clarifies how the contest logically serves the dictatorship staging it, leaving its dystopian premise feeling more like an excuse for spectacle than a fully reasoned world.

The film pushes what plays as an underdeveloped Marxist-humanist worldview: the contestants are uniformly poor or working-class young men, ground up by a brutal, unexplained military dictatorship, while the story leans hard on their growing brotherhood and camaraderie as its moral center. There's real value in that portrait of loyalty, empathy, and sacrifice among the men — those moments genuinely redeem some of the film's darker stretches.

But the film's resolution undercuts whatever moral clarity it built. The ending has its hero seeking a gun as his "one wish" to enact violent revenge against the government figure who wronged his family — and the film frames that revenge as a kind of righteous uprising against "the Man." That's a troubling note to end on, and it reads less like justice than like a call to revolutionary violence dressed up as catharsis.

The longing underneath all this — for a world where oppression is finally answered and the innocent are vindicated — is a real and good longing. But Scripture answers it differently than this film does: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God... 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord" (Romans 12:19). Real justice is God's to execute, not ours to seize with a stolen gun.

There's craft here, and even a few scenes of real brotherhood worth noticing. But nearly 300 obscenities, brutal blood-spray killings, gross bodily-function scenes, and an ending that cheers political revenge add up to more than most readers should carry into a theater. Skip it. Looking for something to watch instead? Start here:.