The Dark Tower * (2017, Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor) – Movie Review

English teen actor Tom Taylor (born 16 July 2001) gives a reasonable performance as 11-year-old New Yorker Jake Chambers having visions involving a Gunslinger who opposes a Man in Black bent on destroying a Tower and ruining the world.

Jake flees from alleged psychiatric workers come to his New York City apartment, recognising them from his visions as monsters in human skin. He discovers an abandoned house from one of his visions, finds a handy portal, and nips through it to travel to the post-apocalyptic Mid-World.

There he meets the last Gunslinger, Roland Deschain, who is pursuing Walter Padick, the Man in Black (both also from the kid’s visions), seeking to kill him to avenge the murder of his father.

Co-writer/ director Nikolaj Arcel’s 2017 sci-fi movie, a continuation of Stephen King’s novel series, cannot raise much interest in this exotic scenario, which, despite all its inherent interest, proves on screen desperately dull, dreary and mundane, feeling just stale and derivative.

Despite starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, the film has as its main actor the third billed Taylor, who is playing the central character Jake, through whose eyes everything here is seen and experienced. That, basically, makes this a kids’ movie (though all the guns make it unsuitable for kids the age of the hero), with Elba and McConaughey drawing the short straws as the boring adults.

It is probably not their fault, but both actors seem hardly engaged with their roles or involved with the film, particularly McConaughey, who is poor. The role of Walter Padick, the Man in Black, needs recasting, since the Oscar winner is apparently incapable of playing a ruthless, ageless deceiver and sorcerer. The part needs grandstanding, lip-smacking villainy, not phoning in.

Elba is a bit better, though he, too, underplays dangerously, in a sleep-walking, sleep-inducing performance. It is written in his tired-looking eyes that he doesn’t know what to do to spark it up.

If Taylor really won the role after an international search, that’s fair, because he’s OK, good enough anyway.

Contributing to the general malaise and boredom, the gloomy cinematography (Rasmus Videbæk), TV-style special effects, alienating score (Tom Holkenborg) and unconvincing dialogue (Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner) are all surprisingly low grade and sub-standard. The obviously harsh and choppy editing down to 95 minutes (including pointless extra $6 million reshoot footage to fill in the Gunslinger’s back story) adds ti the troubles, producing a confused, virtually incomprehensible mess.

The story’s serious themes of father-son relationships, with the boy and the Gunslinger both having lost their dads, and the boy and the Gunslinger inevitably starting up a quasi father-son relationship by the end of the film, just go for nothing. But then the plot goes for nothing, and the characters as well.

The film goes for nothing too. It is a bewildering misfire. People are going to say there is a good film in here somewhere, but I’m not sure that is right.

Filming began in South Africa in April 2016, with some scenes shot in New York.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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