Review: The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower
Cert: 12A / 95 mins / Dir. Nikolaj Arcel / Trailer



As a general rule, I don't read reviews of movies before seeing them, as I don't want to colour my view or expectations before sitting down in the cinema. And yet in relation to The Dark Tower, I'd still seen the word "ambitious" more times than I would have liked, being as it is a cosy and not un-ironic PR euphemism for 'failure'. I'd watched the trailer several times over the last few weeks and thought it looked interesting, at least. Which is to say, I did walk into Screen 3 this afternoon with an open mind*¹…

When troubled teenager Jake (Tom Taylor) begins having ever-more-lucid dreams about an enormous tower at the centre of the universe which holds evil at bay and the sorcerer (Matthew McConaughey) intent on destroying it , his parents arrange for him to be taken into short-term psychiatric care. But Jake's discovery of a dimensional portal leads him to meet The Gunslinger (Idris Elba), who mentors the young charge into unlocking his true potential.

So structurally, this film has all the hallmarks of a decent enough young-adult adventure movie, but with a script written by someone who's never met young adults. The dialogue is clunky and literal, with characters explaining each symbolic item or occurrence before it's even finished being shown. This is The Hero's Journey, but to the point where every milestone becomes cliché rather than convention. On its fleet-footed jaunt through the motions, the movie borrows haphazardly from The Neverending Story, Harry Potter, Thor and Terminator 2. The product of four screenwriters and ten years in development-hell, I have to wonder how much of Stephen King's work is left in here.

In the past I've criticised King adaptations for being unnecessarily long. The Dark Tower is an exception, since it really needs to be at least an hour longer in order to coherently establish its own universe (although I'd be lying if I said I wasn't happy when it ended). This is a screen-version of the second book (of eight) in a previously un-filmed series, and boy does it feel like it. The audience is asked to accept the central premise of the tower with just two brief caption cards at the beginning. After this, it's taken as fact that Jake isn't hallucinating monsters chasing him, and is at the centre of a pan-dimensional conspiracy. All this happens in the first fifteen minutes.

The narrative frequently feels summarised and compacted, to the point where it actually makes no sense. Young Jake gets a pretty good run at being the only thing in the film which is introduced properly, before being effectively relegated to onlooker once Elba and McConaughey make their entrances. They then become the main characters (with little-to-nothing in the way of substantial backstory), which perhaps shouldn't be surprising as Tom Taylor's name or face aren't on the poster…

And much like The Hitman's Bodyguard earlier this week, these two lead performers are trying their damnedest to style-out the script they've been given to work with. Unlike Reynolds and Jackson, they can't pull this off. By the time of the final showdown where McConaughey is levitating bullets and broken glass around like a slightly effete Luke Skywalker, the whole thing had turned into a parody of itself and I was just waiting for the inevitable conclusion.

Not every low-scoring title on Rotten Tomatoes can be a delightful hate-watch, and sometimes you have to watch a thing to realise that the critical consensus exists for a reason. I didn't want to take against The Dark Tower, but the tale which began somewhat passably got progressively worse as it went on, leaving me bored and annoyed.

A more fitting line for The Gunslinger's mantra would perhaps be "I do not write for my runtime. He who writes for his runtime, has forgotten the point of his story…"

Think of this as a sort of post-apocalyptic Tomorrowland.



Only out of morbid curiosity and if there's nothing else on and if someone else is paying.



Admittedly I haven't read Stephen King's source-books, but I'd put money on no.



Nope.



Oh, probably not.



There isn't.



Level 2: This has got that Dennis Haysbert in it, and he was in that Sin City 2 along with Jamie 'Aurra Sing' King.





*¹ Although I feel I should also add that I'm not generally a fan of Stephen King. I respect the hell out of his work as an established, popular and highly successful author but it just isn't for me, and past adaptations of his work have left me in varying states of boredom and disappointment. ^{[ BACK ]}

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