The Long Walk (2025) review

Due to some sort of internal conflict, America is experiencing severe financial problems (which should come as no surprise to anyone), so the military - embodied by the Major (Mark Hamill) - runs a contest (with a large cash prize) in which fifty young men - including Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), McVries (David Jonsson), Art (Tut Nyuot) and pesky Gary (Charlie Plummer) - must continuously walk for hundreds of miles until all but one is left standing, and this means no sleeping, no slowing down and no bathroom breaks.  Since the movie (which is based on a book by "Richard Bachman," which is Stephen King's pen name) is, in fact, a very extended trek and slightly laborious to sit through it could have used a filmmaker with more of a creative touch, and the banter between the lads consists of mundane "tough guy cussin'" and platitudes, which are periodically broken up by histrionics over someone getting shot in the head.  Some readers have speculated that the source text is a metaphor for the war in Vietnam - which King has admitted he wasn't conscious of at the time he was writing it - although younger audiences wouldn't know much about that; it's probably best viewed not as a political statement but as an acting showcase for its (relatively) youthful cast.