It’s not often that I go into a film as a joke and come out feeling a little ashamed of myself. Longtime readers of this blog will recall the concept of the Orpheum Banger. The short version: there’s an AMC theater in Manhattan that has notoriously shitty presentation yet a welcoming atmosphere, which makes it the perfect place to see movies that you don’t expect to be all that great. If you think the movie’s going to be good, you’d make an effort to see it in a nicer theater or a premium format. If you think it’s going to be bad, you don’t see it at all. If you think it’s probably going to be Fine, entertaining and stupid and forgettable, you go to the Orpheum.
I pegged The Long Walk as a potential Orpheum banger as soon as the first trailer dropped. It looked like the quintessential YouTube Shorts movie, the kind of high-concept low-brainpower thing that plays well chopped into 60 second clips scored by a slowed-down version of “Skyfall”. The chipper TikTok AI voiceover introducing things saying “They Have To Keep Walking, Or They Die! :D” You’re picturing it in your head right now. You’ve seen a million of these for films like In Time or District 9. It’s a kind of film where every scene is just a restatement of the premise. The Long Walk looked exactly like that.
So my wife and I decided we’d take our own Long Walk in advance of our Orpheum screening, walking to the theater on the Upper East Side from our apartment in Brooklyn. We did this partly because our gym has been closed all week, and partly, I suppose, to emphasize to ourselves the level of seriousness with which we were taking the entire excursion. Even as a former Stephen King obsessive (in high school I read absolutely everything he had ever published, and kept up with him until around 2014) and more-or-less grudging admirer of Hunger Games auteur Francis Lawrence, I expected very little here. I walked out of the theater feeling, only a little ironically, embarrassed for having trivialized a film that brought me to tears. I wished I had chosen to see it at a theater where the entire left third of the screen wasn’t blurry. Consider this review my penance. The Long Walk is excellent.