"The Dark Tower" is mediocre for most of its runtime. Moments of genuine fun (the otherworldly Roland visiting an Earth hospital), moments of gleeful camp (Matthew McConaughey's sorcerer wearing an apron and cooking chicken in a soon-to-be-victim's apartment), moments of eye-rolling dumbness (McConaughey narrating to his minions about Roland's Arthurian guns), and moments that feel sorta right before they go wrong (when a portal-protecting demon evokes memories of the books before a psychic boy just sorta... *thinks* it away)...
The film's craft is strangely functional and little more, which means that it won't be until you're back in your car (or maybe at home) that you realize just how weird this story actually is. How it's about gifted psychics being spirited away by a trans-dimensional wizard to break reality, and how a gun-slinging knight has to save the day. But of course, that's just the back-of-the-paperback synopsis of the novels, which were (I'm sorry to say) much much better (or at least much much more interesting) than this film.
The film doesn't feel cynical, though (well, most of it-- we'll get there). For most of the tidy runtime (which both keeps the film appreciably quick but also denies characters time for meaningful reaction to story turns), the over-polished edges feel like the product of fear, not indifference. Fear of alienating audiences who the studio clearly believed had certain expectations of blockbusters. Maybe if they would've started production two years later, the success of R-rated films like "Logan" and "Deadpool" would've emboldened them to better honor the harshness of the novels (of which the original novel is inarguably the harshest).
The casting of Idris Elba and McConaughey is inspired, after all. Of the two, Elba fares better. He's got the right mix of distance, gruffness, and buried heart, although he has to fight against the rote story beats every step of the way. McConaughey is an odder case. At times, he perfectly captures the malefic side of Walter O'Dim, and I liked his almost disinterested methods of killing people. But other times they stick him in a room and force him to say plot bullshit to characters who should theoretically already know that plot bullshit (it's odd too that the film gives those non-functioning roles to effective character actors like Fran Kranz and Jackie Earle Haley).
[Sidebar: a "seer" in a village gets substantial credit billing but looks like she got shoved onto screen by Central Casting.]
And here's the thing, I would actually be curious about a sequel, provided that they ejected some of the creative staff and handed the reins over to someone like a Guillermo Del Toro or... hell, unless I'm mind-blocked, he's literally the only director in Hollywood with the courage to make R-rated dark fantasy. Because the cast *is* a good cast, and the story *does* have a lot of opportunity to regain footing after a stumble. Even after decades of producers like Ron Howard and Brian Glazer and a rotating cast of Rolands and directors and various script permutations sanding off one edge after the other.
Or rather, I would've been curious if this film didn't suddenly swerve in the final ten minutes from regrettable-but-sorta-understandable compromises to an absolutely AWFUL upbeat closer. It might as well have frozen on an image of two people leaping in the air and high-fiving. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Maybe a part of me was hoping that the film was carefully apportioning out its allowable risks. "I'll cut here, I'll cut there, I'll add some exposition there, but I'll get to keep integrity with the ending."
It's such a bummer, and despite my slow-simmering anger with Rotten Tomatoes (which continues more or less unabated), while most of the film is more in line with the rote functionality of the recent "The Mummy" film (which never had opportunity to be awful because it never took meaningful risks), the ending scurries away from any of the tepid pleasures of the film and reminds me of the unconscionable ending of "Leviathan" (a movie that wants to be "Alien underwater but ends with arbitrary shark attacks, black guy dying, and heroes heroically punching corporate stooges).
So, yeah. Like I said earlier, I wanted to give this film a shot, and I wanted to be charitable. I did, and it still disappointed. Roland would say it's forgotten the face of its father. Maybe the problem is that it had too many of them.
Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
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