Worth: $5.00
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Cast:
Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Katheryn Winnick, Fran Kranz, Jackie Earle Haley
Intro:
The Dark Tower is a bad film, certainly, but even worse it’s a profoundly ordinary one.
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower book series is epic in every sense of the word. The eight volumes span time, dimensions, other worlds and close to 5,000 pages. It’s strange, majestic and occasionally infuriating, but it makes an unforgettable impact. It’s puzzling then that The Dark Tower movie adaptation is so bland that a mere 24 hours after watching it you may find you struggle to recall any of the details.
The story revolves around 11-year-old Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) a young man with a powerful “shine” aka psychic power. He dreams and draws pictures of a tower, a sinister Man in Black, Walter (Matthew McConaughey) and a heroic Gunslinger, Roland (Idris Elba). Jake believes his dreams are real, but his mother, Laurie (Katheryn Winnick) fears for his sanity.
Leaving aside its bastardisation of the source material, this isn’t a bad set up for a fantasy movie. The problem is that before your bum has had time to settle into your cinema seat, and certainly before an effective tone can be established, Jake whisks himself off through a portal into Mid-World and meets Roland with minimal audience engagement. This, sadly, is a recurring theme in The Dark Tower. Stuff just seems to happen in a blur of murky CGI and underwritten characters.
Director Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) directs the film with scant flair and absolutely zero atmosphere, delivering a product that manages to make monsters wearing human skins and concentration camps full of psychic teens dull. Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey try valiantly to breathe some life into Akiva Goldsman’s shallow, derivative script but are defeated at every turn by wince-inducing dialogue and baffling character decisions.
Ultimately the best thing that can be said about The Dark Tower is that it’s short. At a mere 95 minutes including credits you won’t have to endure it for long, but one can’t help but feel the sting of wasted potential and misused actors. Stephen King fans will be disappointed, obviously, but it’s hard to imagine even the most forgiving general audience finding something to love in this disjointed, inspiration-free enterprise.
The Dark Tower is a bad film, certainly, but even worse it’s a profoundly ordinary one. An utterly generic take on one of fiction’s more unique tales? Thankee-sai, but no thankee-sai.
Somehow a deeply mystical tale was turned into a typical American shoot ’em up. And, although the acting was good, the most interesting and charming characters were simply left out. I couldn’t reconcile a Jake without his billy bumbler. And Walter was way too big in the story. I was hoping for an enjoyable movie in spite of it’s differences from the books but I was disappointed.
If the author (or good ol’ Travis Johnson) reads this, could they offer their opinion on whether it would be this bad if they had deigned (as per the original plans, I thought) to spread it out over a few movies and a couple of TV series, to give them time to fully explore it?
I.E. is the issue that they crammed too much into one film with not enough time to do it justice… or is it just plain s***?
It’s kinda both – in reducing so much material down into such a short running time, they’ve rendered it into fertiliser. I can just about see how, if I’d seen it when I was ten and had no idea about the books, I might have dug it, because it feels like a valiant but unsuccessful kids’ genre adventure flick circa 87-90 – and in saying that, I mean it’s pretty generic, predictable, and staid. IT’s crime isn’t necessarily that it’s terrible, it;s that it’s just so goddamn boring.
I’d say the story is a little thin.