The Dark Tower - Tired, haphazard adaptation
Two high calibre actors, a script penned by the man who wrote A Beautiful Mind and Stephen King's The Dark Tower cult classic book series as source material, this should have been absolute home run. So what in the world went wrong?
Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is a young boy experiencing terrifying nightmares every night that coincide with record-setting earthquakes. His dreams show him a tower that stretches beyond the clouds which a Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) launches powerful magic blasts at using the minds of magically gifted children in an attempt to destroy the structure. Jake travels to this alternate dimension where he meets Roland (Idris Elba) a gunslinger whose past tragedies have been directly influenced by The Man in Black. Roland and Jake join a quest to stop the Man in Black once and for all from destroying the Tower that protects all their worlds.
The Dark Tower is a hodge-podge of half realized ideas that make no sense. The Man in Black’s magic allows him to stop people from breathing, but Jake and Roland are immune to this magic for undefined reasons and sometimes he uses alternate magic to defeat people who he can just kill by ordering they cease inhalation. The generic and boring minions that work for The Man in Black wear fake skins to appear as humans, and the only way to identify them is if the seams break apart which happens only when it is most convenient for the protagonists to identify them.
Also, the most interesting elements of Stephen King’s book series is that as the narrative unfolds you discover that the books give evidence that every single one of King’s novels is connected in the same ever-expanding universe. The frustrating thing about how the film adaptation handles this is with small little hints at films like “It” and “The Shining.” It never truly expands on this idea in a meaningful way at all.
This movie doesn’t include the elements that the readers of the books loved and it’s completely incomprehensible control over its explanation of important plot elements makes it almost unlikeable to any possible viewer.
Add onto this the fact that McConaughey’s performance is abysmal, swapping believability and charisma for a cartoon villain who uses magic to manipulate children into hating their mothers like it’s as much of his daily routine as eating his vitamins. On the opposite side of the spectrum is Tom Taylor who is a poorly conceived star of the film as his performance of Jake is devoid of any likeability or personality and his constant whining makes him an insufferable main protagonist.
The only saving grace of the film is Elba’s Roland Deschain who exudes personality as he is apt to do in almost all of his films and shows. Sure his character is nothing special, he’s just a generic knight character who fights with guns instead of a sword, but his path and tragic backstory does make his story somewhat compelling compared to the rest of the film’s banal and contrived storyline. He also delivers a bulk of the action in this film, which is competently done, albeit a little generic except for a few distinct elements like Roland’s brandishing and shooting of his guns as well as his unique ways of reloading his twin revolvers. Throwing bullets in the air and then swinging his piece to catch them in the cylinder is a really unique and interesting effect.
Other than all this the film also takes a few hits due to horrible production design, really bad computer generated effects, poor writing like Jake’s therapist literally telling him he is crazy and that the earthquakes aren’t odd right when an earthquake happens, and a slew of characters even more uninteresting than our main three roles.
All in all, The Dark Tower is a poorly conceived mess that the studios should’ve given up on trying to create long ago. It’s very much like The Man in Black’s goons: attempting to wear a fake suit to disguise itself as a good film, when in reality it’s seams are falling apart to reveal it’s nothing more than a cheap, badly done adaptation.