Movie Review: The Dark Tower

To whomever said that Stephen King’s epic novel The Dark Tower was un-adaptable to the big screen, we owe you a Coke. The supremely silly movie sequel to King’s dense Dark Tower book series is an embarrassment to all involved from King to director Nicolaj Arcel to Academy Award winning star Matthew McConaughey and Academy Award nominated producer Ron Howard, who for some reason passed on directing The Dark Tower himself; golly, I can’t imagine why?

The work of the prolific Mr. King seems to resist adaptation in the same way a country might resist an invading army. Don’t misunderstand, some have managed to pull off the trick; Stanley Kubrick made The Shining, though Stephen King hated his adaptation; Frank Darabont did okay with The Green Mile but again, King hated that one as well and even The Shawshank Redemption wasn’t beloved by the creator even as audiences loved it. Of the 50 or so King properties made into television or feature films, only a handful have turned out watchable and The Dark Tower is not one of those movies.

Idris Elba is the star of The Dark Tower as Roland the Eld, a Gunslinger living on a Middle Earth where everything has been lost to some sort of apocalypse started by the evil Walter (Matthew McConaughey), a sorcerer(?) bent on destroying the Dark Tower which stands in the middle of a dozen or so galaxies and protects from the ultimate evil beyond the stars. Standing alongside Roland is teenager Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) whose visionary nightmares brought him to this middle earth, not the Lord of the Rings one, a Stephen King one, where he hopes to prevent the apocalypse on his version of Earth(?). (The movie is such a mess it's impossible to say whether Walter is a sorcerer or what Jake's motivations truly are, hence all the question marks.)

The Dark Tower was director by Nicolaj Arcel who seems entirely over-matched by this material. Arcel’s previous effort was the studious period piece A Royal Affair and it showed he could wrangle a sweet period piece romance but I am not sure what producer Ron Howard saw in that film that led them to believe Arcel could marshal the silliness of The Dark Tower into anything other than another abominable Stephen King adaptation.

Poor Matthew McConaughey takes it on the chin for the cast of The Dark Tower. While Taylor has youth as an excuse and while Elba can fall back on the cool Gunslinger persona, McConaughey is adrift as the ultimate evil, Walter. Sure, he’s also referred to as The Man in Black but even then, his costume includes a long coat with shoulder pads that make him look more 80s Dynasty diva than ultimate evil. Why they decided that the ultimate evil, worse than the Devil, Roland claims, should be called Walter is one of several bizarre decisions made by the creators of The Dark Tower. Sure, that could be something from King's book but even then, they could have written that part out of the movie considering how this is a follow-up to the books and not a straight adaptation.

Even more embarrassing for poor Matthew McConaughey is the fighting style employed by Walter and his consistently inconsistent power to control people’s minds. When Walter does battle, his main move appears to be wacky jazz hands with McConaughey flailing his digits to grab bullets and manipulate broken glass and pieces of steel without laying a finger on them. Then there is Walter’s awesome mind-control powers that come and go as the plot needs them and depending on whether you’re a lead character or not.

At the very least, McConaughey isn’t the only member of the cast stuck with horrendously amateur ADR that makes it seem as if no actual dialogue was recorded outside of a post-production booth. There are times when the vocal dubbing is so bad that Bruce Lee might have found it embarrassing. In all my years as a professional film critic I have never seen a project with so much hype and budget that looks this cheap and silly.

The Dark Tower is so bad that it reminded me more than once of the darkest days of M. Night Shyamalan, the period from The Village through The Happening to Lady in the Water and before he returned to actually making movies with sublime horror flicks The Visit and Split. With talk of "The Shine" and "Seers" and "Ultimate Evils," I recalled the supreme silliness of Lady in the Water more than once, though The Dark Tower lacks that films modestly charming audaciousness, replaced here by simple embarrassment.

The Dark Tower is a jaw-droppingly bad film. It’s a movie that you don’t so much watch as marvel at. It’s hard to watch The Dark Tower without repeatedly thinking to yourself how such a mess with such massive star-power and budget could be this remarkably bad. Much of the blame falls on director Arcel but there is plenty of blame to go around; after all, Arcel couldn’t have signed off on the film himself. There are studio executives, producers and at least one of the pair of movie stars at the movie’s core that must share some responsibility for the dire awfulness on display in The Dark Tower.