The Dark Tower
Everyone has their favorite sprawling fantasy series that they want to see adapted into a movie. Mine is the Wheel of Time, which I’ve come to accept will never amount to either a movie or television series worth much in the end. Lord of the Rings fans, in this respect, don’t realize how fortunate they are. The Dune series has yet to be fleshed out into a series, with only a bad David Lynch movie, a worse Syfy Channel remake, and a potentially mediocre remake to its name. Hell – even the Anne Rice novels have only two installments: a movie that could have been great, but wasn’t; and a movie that never should have been, but is.
From time immemorial, Stephen King fans have been wanting a film adaptation of his masterpiece, the Dark Tower. It’s really quite bizarre, given the amount of King adaptions in existence, that it never was made into a mini-series, but such is life. Then, in 2017, we got the much awaited Dark Tower movie, which every King fan worth their salt immediately knew was going to suck utter balls. This was a fact that could be easily deduced from it’s run time alone. A three-hour movie might, in the right hands, have been able to do the multi-volume work justice; a 90-minute movie, even in the best hands, had zero chance of being anything other than lame, rushed, and incomprehensible both in itself as well as why anyone ever thought it was a good idea.
The Dark Tower doesn’t even have the negative merit of being enjoyable as a bad movie. There are a handful of things, which it would be inhuman for me to spoil, that are laugh aloud funny. But for the most part, the Dark Tower sludges through its 90 minutes with such boredom and meaninglessness you feel as if you’re walking through the Swamps of Sadness and just need to give up and go to sleep – forever.
Idris Elba tries, and manages from time to time, to do some pretty cool things, such as rack bullets from his belt to his six-shooter; but for the most part his intensity, when present, seems aimed elsewhere. It’s particularly sad to me, coming right off the Wire, to see Elba like this. Matthew McConaughey, it must be said, is so out of it he seems lost on set and desperately looking back upon former characters to find motivation for anything he does. Other than Lagertha from Vikings, there’s no other actor of note.
Well, the pot-head from Cabin in the Woods is in it, if you missed him; and Rorschach too, but his presence is distracting because this movie is so bad it makes you want to watch the Nightmare on Elm Street remake again because at least in that things happened.
The plot, despite how complex the movie seems, it bare-bones simple: a boy named Jake, who has a predilection for drawing creepy pictures, has a great and powerful “shine”. What is “shine”? Psychic powers. McConaughey uses children he cross-dimensionally abducts to blast psychic power at the Dark Tower. He wants to do this so he can rule the Universe, but don’t try to iron-out the logic of that: just let it go. Elba, the Gunslinger, is out for revenge and maybe incidentally stopping him if that works itself into the plot too.
Basically, the Dark Tower is a Portal Romp. Characters teleport so often in this movie I bet if you tallied up how many times Nightcrawler teleports in that awesome assassination scene in X-2, it would come far short of the bouncing and bouncing the characters in this movie do. I think they even teleport to the same place twice. Not much of anything really happens wherever they go. On Earth, Round 2, Elba takes a lot of pain-killers and tells some college girls they have forgotten the faces of their fathers, which begs the hilarious question of if they ever saw them.
On another planet, Elba talks with a Seer; the planet is attacked, and Jake is kidnapped. Snooze. I had long since stopped caring for Jake, as well as the cinematic universe only he can save. There’s a finale that might as well have not happened. Elba kills McConaughey by shooting one bullet with another he just shot, which is laughably lame, but with the added stupidity of hitting the first bullet with a ricochet. I haven’t seen ill-conceived bullet-drama done that badly since Steven Seagal literally shot a bullet through a flying arrow in a movie I can’t even remember the name of.
So, yeah – the Dark Tower sucks as bad as you probably thought it would. If you have a hankering for the novels, it’s much better, and will save your sweet time, to just watch a YouTube video of Elba’s highlights. Even that might require enhancement form various substances to make it worth your time. I would have hated it less if it hadn’t featured two amazing actors, whose presence adds embarrassment on their behalf to the many, many other feelings of displeasure this movie can’t help but arouse.
I give it zero stars.
Everyone has their favorite sprawling fantasy series that they want to see adapted into a movie. Mine is the Wheel of Time, which I’ve come to accept will never amount to either a movie or television series worth much in the end. Lord of the Rings fans, in this respect, don’t realize how fortunate they are. The Dune series has yet to be fleshed out into a series, with only a bad David Lynch movie, a worse Syfy Channel remake, and a potentially mediocre remake to its name. Hell – even the Anne Rice novels have only two installments: a movie that could have been great, but wasn’t; and a movie that never should have been, but is.
From time immemorial, Stephen King fans have been wanting a film adaptation of his masterpiece, the Dark Tower. It’s really quite bizarre, given the amount of King adaptions in existence, that it never was made into a mini-series, but such is life. Then, in 2017, we got the much awaited Dark Tower movie, which every King fan worth their salt immediately knew was going to suck utter balls. This was a fact that could be easily deduced from it’s run time alone. A three-hour movie might, in the right hands, have been able to do the multi-volume work justice; a 90-minute movie, even in the best hands, had zero chance of being anything other than lame, rushed, and incomprehensible both in itself as well as why anyone ever thought it was a good idea.
The Dark Tower doesn’t even have the negative merit of being enjoyable as a bad movie. There are a handful of things, which it would be inhuman for me to spoil, that are laugh aloud funny. But for the most part, the Dark Tower sludges through its 90 minutes with such boredom and meaninglessness you feel as if you’re walking through the Swamps of Sadness and just need to give up and go to sleep – forever.
Idris Elba tries, and manages from time to time, to do some pretty cool things, such as rack bullets from his belt to his six-shooter; but for the most part his intensity, when present, seems aimed elsewhere. It’s particularly sad to me, coming right off the Wire, to see Elba like this. Matthew McConaughey, it must be said, is so out of it he seems lost on set and desperately looking back upon former characters to find motivation for anything he does. Other than Lagertha from Vikings, there’s no other actor of note.
Well, the pot-head from Cabin in the Woods is in it, if you missed him; and Rorschach too, but his presence is distracting because this movie is so bad it makes you want to watch the Nightmare on Elm Street remake again because at least in that things happened.
The plot, despite how complex the movie seems, it bare-bones simple: a boy named Jake, who has a predilection for drawing creepy pictures, has a great and powerful “shine”. What is “shine”? Psychic powers. McConaughey uses children he cross-dimensionally abducts to blast psychic power at the Dark Tower. He wants to do this so he can rule the Universe, but don’t try to iron-out the logic of that: just let it go. Elba, the Gunslinger, is out for revenge and maybe incidentally stopping him if that works itself into the plot too.
Basically, the Dark Tower is a Portal Romp. Characters teleport so often in this movie I bet if you tallied up how many times Nightcrawler teleports in that awesome assassination scene in X-2, it would come far short of the bouncing and bouncing the characters in this movie do. I think they even teleport to the same place twice. Not much of anything really happens wherever they go. On Earth, Round 2, Elba takes a lot of pain-killers and tells some college girls they have forgotten the faces of their fathers, which begs the hilarious question of if they ever saw them.
On another planet, Elba talks with a Seer; the planet is attacked, and Jake is kidnapped. Snooze. I had long since stopped caring for Jake, as well as the cinematic universe only he can save. There’s a finale that might as well have not happened. Elba kills McConaughey by shooting one bullet with another he just shot, which is laughably lame, but with the added stupidity of hitting the first bullet with a ricochet. I haven’t seen ill-conceived bullet-drama done that badly since Steven Seagal literally shot a bullet through a flying arrow in a movie I can’t even remember the name of.
So, yeah – the Dark Tower sucks as bad as you probably thought it would. If you have a hankering for the novels, it’s much better, and will save your sweet time, to just watch a YouTube video of Elba’s highlights. Even that might require enhancement form various substances to make it worth your time. I would have hated it less if it hadn’t featured two amazing actors, whose presence adds embarrassment on their behalf to the many, many other feelings of displeasure this movie can’t help but arouse.
I give it zero stars.