Dystopian Kings: THE LONG WALK and THE RUNNING MAN

When Stephen King first published The Long Walk and The Running Man in 1979 and 1982, respectively, they played as broad, heightened extrapolations of contemporary ills through classically satirical sci-fi pessimism. They’re stories about a callous American culture that sells its youth and its underclasses false hopes and delivers only violence. They’re stories about a society desensitized to cruelty and allergic to sincerity. They’re stories about a series of dead ends. It’s perhaps a sign of our increasingly dystopian present that as these stories return to us on the big screen in 2025 they seem a little less far-fetched. The movies preserve King’s sense of finely sliced pulp, with their origins in his shorter, more energetically nasty works under the pen name Richard Bachman. But they also cannily update their sense of doom. The former leans toward futility and despair. The latter gets a charge out of revolutionary violence. Both end up with endings that try to have it every which way, but they are totally earnest about the difficulty of exiting a social structure when every system is calibrated to keep you down. 

The Long Walk is the drearier of the two. It’s set in a desolated American landscape that looks grey and brown and dingy as far as the eye can see. A group of young men are called up to participate in the eponymous game. It’s a yearly contest done for propagandistic purposes. A grizzled military man (Mark Hamill) who carries about him a parody of tough masculinity barks out the rules. They’ll walk at a 3 mile per hour pace across the country. The last person walking wins. The others will die, shot in the head for the crime of pausing, or slowing, and giving up. If the idea of an annual death march sounds like a pulp fiction extrapolation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or an embryonic form of the themes that’d later come into fuller flower in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games, you’re on the right track. That this film comes from director Francis Lawrence, best known for adapting Collins’ series in several excellent dystopian thrillers, completes the comparison. This movie has none of that franchise’s impulses toward the epic or to revolution. Instead it’s a deliberate trudge, as an ensemble of young male actors (with such likable leads as Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, looking for all the world like a pair of sad-eyed, round-faced puppies) is ruthlessly winnowed down to a tragic final few. Because they’ve come to share some camaraderie with each other, it’s all the more gripping and gutting when they, and we, know all but one will lie dead in the street before the credits roll. It’s a look at the dark heart of a society’s anesthetizing fear of violence. In its original context it’s a clear Vietnam War allegory. Now it hooks into free-floating anxieties about state power and our willingness to give ourselves up into the gears of the machine in fleeting hope for a better life. It’s a bloody bummer. 

More vibrant pop art action thrills are to be found in Edgar Wright’s take on The Running Man. Even the added participle in the title ought to signal the speed it has over the Walk. This one finds a bustling, glowingly dirty futuristic America that’s lost the fight against oligarchic takeover. Here the government and media conglomerates are basically joined in one corporate state. A permanent underclass looks toward exploitative game shows as the only way out, whether as mind-numbing entertainment or as a shot at fluke riches. The same basic premise made for a thuddingly obvious Schwarzenegger picture in the 80s. This new picture finds Glen Powell’s charms as a sly lunk giving the proceedings a more empathetic and energetic tone, a lightness of touch despite its grinning manipulations and toothsome media satire. He plays a desperate unemployed father with a sick child. Against his wife’s wishes, he tries out to be a contestant on any show and ends up sorted into The Running Man, a contest in which he must survive thirty days on the run from the show’s paramilitary hunters and the general public, too. Snarling producer Josh Brolin and slimy host Colman Domingo hype up the propaganda, hoping to get the audience at home hating Powell by smearing him as a criminal. But his runaway tour of action sequences through the backstreets and backwoods of New England finds eccentric helpers every step of the way, from a black market tech guy (William H. Macy) to a conspiracy theorist (Michael Cera) to an extremely reluctant hostage (Emilia Jones). The have-nots love to assist him in running; it’s the snitching haves he needs to watch out for. Wright doesn’t overwhelm the movie with his usual rhythmic editing and snappy transitions, nor does he push the pedal to the metal on his verbal cleverness or pounding pop soundtracks, a la his Shaun of the Dead or Baby Driver. Instead, that’s just a light pulse of personality in a totally proficient piece of genre craftsmanship that’s a little zippier and brainer than it needs to be, popping with color and movement and a cheeky sense of punk revolt. It doesn’t quite know how to get out of its crass, exploitative cultural mess of social issues with a satisfactory conclusion, but then again, we don’t either. 

Bed Time: THE SESSIONS

For a movie based on a true story about a severely disabled man who decides it’s time he finally experienced sex, The Sessions feels awfully safe. That it doesn’t become smutty or distasteful is a credit to the warmth and humor that writer-director Ben Lewin brings out of the film’s lead performances. John Hawkes plays the disabled man, a poet who spends most of his time in an iron lung. During the few hours a day in which he’s not contained in this life-sustaining device, his assistant (Moon Bloodgood) wheels him about on a stretcher. Feeling he’s nearing his “expiration date,” and after consulting with a compassionate priest (William H. Macy), he decides that he’d like to understand what real intimacy is all about. He gets in contact with a sex therapist (Helen Hunt) who schedules six sessions of body awareness exercises. It’s an edgy concept softened and diluted by sleepy, soft-focus sentimentality until it’s about nothing more than better living and better relationships through better physical awareness.

But rather than growing sanctimonious, the film remains low-key and character-driven, playing out in simple scenes, developing the relationship between the man and his therapist. Rare is the sequence that holds more than two characters at a time. Thin and short, the film proceeds with a dash of charm and gets by on an unexpected matter-of-fact, all-smiles approach that preemptively deflates the base, exploitative approach that one can imagine a lesser production might have, even inadvertently, fallen into. Lewin builds a story that’s out to do nothing more than assert the basic humanity of all persons no matter what their conditions or occupations and to do so with some fine acting and surprising lightness.

That’s nice, I suppose, and the total visual indifference – flat staging and inexpressive framing – doesn’t interfere with those aims all that much. Lewin’s seemingly apathetic direction and plain visual sense is hardly enough to kill the film outright, no matter how treacly and plodding the whole thing becomes at times. Periodic scenes of Hawkes bonding with Macy’s remarkably patient and accommodating priest underline the breezy seriousness of the whole thing. It’s a glossy, decently put together film that, if it weren’t for its R-rated giggliness, could’ve passed for a mildly daring TV Movie of the Week in the 90s.

It’s all about the acting here. Hawkes, working wonders with an effortful pinched, nasally voice, has a limited physical range in the role, placed flat on his back, forcing him to wrench his neck around to speak to other characters in the scene. He’s convincing. You’d never know he wasn’t bedridden if he hadn’t been a stellar character actor for a couple decades now. He plays the role as a full, convincing person with a rich interior life, where there had to have been the unfortunate temptation of using restricted movements and vocal acrobatics as an Oscar-gambit gimmick. He projects the countenance and tenor of a man for whom it takes a great deal of work to speak, let alone write, and yet in his poetry and in his narration, he has a grace of expression that’s rather touching.

Hunt has a trickier role. The film simply asks more of her, a nakedness of expression and presentation that Hawkes isn’t called to provide in anything close to the same quantity. She carries with her the entire balance of the film’s matter-of-fact method. In her acting duets of therapeutic intimacy and slowly expanding openness with Hawkes, he projects nervous anxiety. She’s all earthy, natural comfort, ready and willing to do what it takes to help this man feel some release, even for one brief moment. That the two develop a friendship that deeply affects both of them is hardly in doubt. That there will be medical challenges and a dénouement of weepy uplift is another given. But somehow Hunt and Hawkes, in the movie’s best moments, distract from those inevitabilities.

It’s a simple movie about how we should be kind and understanding to one another that’s carried only by the hard work of the cast. The totality of its worth rests with them. This is a movie that’s content to be a thin true story softly told, visually shoddy and narratively predictable. As such, this is a film that has little to recommend it beyond the chance to see two good actors do very good work in a mediocre movie.