The Dark Tower isn’t a terrible movie, it’s merely a disastrous attempt to bring the project to translate Stephen King’s magnum opus to life (as if being only in written form just isn’t good enough). Watch it on it’s own values and it’s an entertaining enough 90 minutes.
It makes a certain sort of sense to introduce the story and world of The Dark Tower through Jake’s eyes. It’s a quick and accessible method to use him as the audience identification, hey, he even gets bullied at school. This does have knock on effects though. Putting so much emphasis on a teen character gives the impression of a studio chasing a Young Adult franchise and if execs thought The Dark Tower could be the next Hunger Games, boy, they picked the wrong series of books.
Avoiding killing off Jake in the first instalment (as happens in the books) would have saved a lot of bother further down the line, and introducing the breakers here has it’s positives, dropping in concepts from much further down the line. Having Walter, the villain of the piece, in charge of the operation and trying to get his hands on Jake is neat and tidy enough. Tom Taylor does a solid job as Jake and Matthew McConaughey if anything, doesn’t ham it up quite enough.
The problem is spending so much time on Jake and Walter means that Roland, the actual main character of The Dark Tower, comes a distant third place in the character stakes. By the time Jake meets him we’re a good way into the movie and at 90 odd minutes there isn’t enough time to get to know Roland. It’s like telling Temple Of Doom through Short Round’s eyes and keeping Indy to the sidelines. There was either a lot of Idris Elba left on the cutting room floor, or it was one of the quickest jobs of his career.
The most impressive thing watching The Dark Tower is how after a certain point the movie becomes thoroughly ashamed of itself. The first half or so ticks along nicely and confidently enough but when Jake and Roland come back to Earth you’d expect things to really kick into gear and the story to open out. Instead it suddenly can’t wait to be over; we have a few moments of fish-out-of-water comedy, then an entire one action scene, then the movie ends. It seems determined to wipe itself from your screen, apologetically. The sense of self-loathing is palpable. When the final credits roll, it’s like seeing a dog sat next to the turd on the kitchen floor.
Again, this comes back to time. The reduced running time causes the frantic dash for the finish line. Like Disney’s Artemis Fowl, this has the stench of a nervous studio that has smelled turkey and ordered repeated cuts. Artemis Fowl is a pillar to post fuck up so complete it makes The Dark Tower seems like a piece of cinematic perfection to rival Aliens.
What are we supposed to come out with from The Dark Tower? We have’t been on a rollicking adventure, we haven’t been introduced to a new world beyond hefty info-dumps of exposition, and we haven’t fallen in love with characters we want to see again.
It’s clear that this team hasn’t got what it takes to translate The Drawing Of The Three, the much improved second novel of the series. If they moved Roland to the background here, imagine what they would do with the junkie Eddie Dean.
You have forgotten the face of your father…
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