Review of The Dark Tower (2017) by Patrick L — 20 Oct 2017

"Not alright! Not alright! Not alright! Not alright! "The Dark Tower" is an unimaginative and dreary-looking summer popcorn flick".

Movie Review: The Dark Tower.

Date Viewed: August 4 2017.

Directed By Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair).

Screenplay By Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen and Nikolaj Arcel, Based on the novels by Stephen King.

Starring: Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Claudia Kim, Jackie Earle Haley, Abbey Lee, Fran Kranz, Katheryn Winnick, Dennis Haysbert, Nicholas Pauling, Michael Barbieri, Alex McGregor and De-Wet Nagel.

"The Dark Tower" is an unimaginative and dreary-looking summer popcorn flick. It was in development hell since 2007, several directors including J.J. Abrams and Ron Howard went back and forth on the project, several big Hollywood stars including Javier Bardem, Viggo Mortensen, Liam Neeson and Russell Crowe went back and forth on the project, scripts were either scrapped or retooled. No matter much talent Sony could throw at it, "The Dark Tower" still couldn't get off the ground. Finally after a decade of several re-workings and differing creative visions, Sony decided to give it a go and they handed the keys over to Danish filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) and cast Idris Elba as the Gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black.

I was very skeptic about the project at first but I was still somewhat hopeful that it was going to be good because Elba and McConaughey were going to be in it. Now finally arriving in theaters, does "The Dark Tower" stand up? Of course not! With a troubled production history, several directorial changes, a series of reshoots and awful test screenings, it became very likely that "The Dark Tower" will collapse under it's own weight. Based on Stephen King's popular book series of the same name, "The Dark Tower" still contains the same elements and cliches from King's horror novels but he envisioned his novel series like "The Hunger Games".

Not only is it one of the worst Stephen King adaptations ever produced on the big screen, it's also clunky, so self-serious and the visual effects look like crap. Don't get me wrong, Idris Elba makes for an awesome gunslinger but this film somehow manages to make him boring. "The Dark Tower" strips away all of his charisma and he's having no fun here. As for Matthew McConaughey, My God! Is he laughable in this. He's essentially playing an evil version of his broody, good-looking driver character from those Lincoln commercials. It's the kind of bad Matthew McConaughey performance that makes you go: Not alright! Not alright! Not alright! Not alright! Look I love Matthew McConaughey, for a while I didn't because he was making so many terrible rom-coms but for this past several years, he has become a valuable screen presence. But with this movie, I beginning to suspect that McConaughey didn't fully understand the original source material. He just talks silly, he CGIs some stuff up and he broods a lot which makes the Man in Black a not-so compelling character.

Besides the two main recognizable leads, "The Dark Tower" follows a young school boy named Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), he continues to experience visions involving a Man in Black who wants to destroy a Tower, wreak havoc and bring total destruction to the world and a Gunslinger who opposes him at every turn. Jake also draws pictures of the figures and things he sees in his dreams but like most nerdy outsiders who have no friends, he gets teased by school bullies and he has a jerky stepfather (Nicholas Pauling). These tired and annoyingly cliched aspects always appear in Stephen King's books. Jake really believes that his visions are real and that there is another world out there but his mother, Laurie Chambers (Katheryn Winnick) and stepfather dismiss his dreams as make believe and the douchebag stepdad thinks that it is time for Jake to go to a rehabilitation facility. When a group of psychiatric workers come in to Jake's New York City apartment home and offer to take him in, Jake immediately recognizes them from his visions but as monsters hiding in human skin and he makes a run for it. Jake hides in the abandoned house he saw in his visions and he discovers a high-tech portal where it sucks him into a post-apocalyptic world called Mid-World.

Once there, Jake encounters a gunslinger named Roland Deschain (Elba), whose the last of his kind. Roland is on a revenge mission to seek and kill, Walter Padick (McConaughey) who's the Man in Black, for murdering his father (Dennis Haysbert). Roland explains to Jake that Walter or the Man in Black has been abducting psychic children so that he can use their powers to destroy the fabled Dark Tower which keeps and balances the universe together. If the Dark Tower collapses, monsters from the darkness outside will unleash mayhem and anarchy into our world. The third act of the film boils down to a predictable clash between good and evil where we get messy action sequences and very limp storytelling.

With lame dialogue, an incomprehensible plot and tons of exposition, how can you take Stephen King's popular "Dark Tower" novel series, combine elements from several of the novels and mashup different genres (sci-fi, western, horror, action, adventure) and still end up with a 95-minute clunker that has zero emotional value. It's hard to get invested with any of the characters because they have little personality and are given no direction. Occasionally you get bits of humor from the two protagonists but even with that said, it's still a gloomy enterprise.

Will the King himself like this movie? I'm not so sure? The only film I can recall he didn't like was "The Shining". Sony also has TV franchise plans for "The Dark Tower" if it makes it's money back but I seriously doubt it. "The Dark Tower" might've been richly well-structured as a book series but as a movie it is exceedingly dull.