At The Movies: The Long Walk a chilling fable, Highest 2 Lowest a thrilling parable

The Long Walk

108 minutes, opens on Sept 11

★★★★☆

The story: The United States of the near future is a dictatorship. Fifty teen boys are chosen by lottery for an annual marathon, walking continuously at three miles (about 4.8km) an hour until only one is left alive to win any prize he wishes.

To be an adolescent in the totalitarian dystopias of American film-maker Francis Lawrence is to be sacrificed in a death sport for the honour of inspiring a depressed post-war nation.

The Long Walk is another chilling fable by the director of The Hunger Games series (2012 to 2023). It is based on American horror writer Stephen King’s first novel, written in 1979 as a Vietnam War allegory.

The race has no destination, no finish line and no rest. The Major (Mark Hamill) and his military convoy are the escorts, shooting stragglers along the way in quick kills of brutal realism.

This walk-or-die story of stark simplicity derives harrowing power by focusing on just the walkers – centrally, the sustaining friendship between big-hearted Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and charismatic Peter McVries (David Jonsson).

Hoffman is evocative casting. His late father, Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, was Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games films. Jonsson is a major discovery, and the diverse personalities include an antagonist (Charlie Plummer) and the Major’s illegitimate son (Garrett Wareing).

You are embedded with the excellent young ensemble so that you feel their exhaustion, their blisters, their hopelessness and their determination. You witness their conflicts, but ultimately, the brotherhood, as they help one another endure the next mile.

For some of them, their minds will come undone before their bodies do.

Such is the psychological, physical and emotional toll – and their gruelling journey will become yours, too.

Hot take: This Stephen King adaptation, one of the best and surely the bleakest, is a horror of slow grinding inhumanity.

Highest 2 Lowest

135 minutes, streaming on Apple TV+

★★★★☆

The story: In the Hollywood giants’ fifth collaboration, Spike Lee directs his Malcolm X (1992) and Inside Man (2006) star Denzel Washington as New York music mogul David King. Anti-hero King’s professional and personal fortunes are at stake when a kidnapper (A$AP Rocky) mistakes his driver’s son for his. The US$17 million (S$22 million) ransom is all the money he has. Should he use it to save his floundering record label or someone else’s kid?

Do The Right Thing, the title of a 1989 Spike Lee joint, serves well as an admonition for this ethical conundrum.

American crime drama Highest 2 Lowest is a contemporary reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 Japanese classic High And Low with the added complexity of the family chauffeur now also his master’s childhood friend. But Paul (Jeffrey Wright) knows that, confidantes though they are, he will never be King’s equal.

Few are. Washington is swaggering magnetism as King the kingmaker, clinging to a diminished empire in a fast-changing industry. The abduction crisis, and how he chooses to respond, further threatens his legacy.

When the police prove ineffectual, he takes matters into his own hands. He packs a pistol and descends from the heights of his Brooklyn penthouse ivory tower into his old Bronx neighbourhood in a parable on power and privilege and the chasm between rich and poor, heaven and hell, and art and commerce.

King’s interborough subway journey turns into a tour de force pursuit through a raucous Yankee Stadium crowd and a euphoric Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Lee’s love letter to his home town in all its chaotic vitality is a jazzy swing of themes, tones and black pride iconographies that climaxes with an electrifying rap battle.

Hot take: Get on the downtown train for a thrill ride.