‘Dark Tower’ a pale version of King’s crowning work
A movie doesn’t have to be rated R to be scary, but it should have a villain who doesn’t come off as the love child of Voldemort and a second-rate stand-up comic moonlighting as the host of a local dance club’s Goth & Industrial Night.
As the glibly wisecracking, well-coiffed demonic sorcerer Walter Padick — also known as the Man in Black, thanks to his selfexplanatory, funereal attire — Matthew Mcconaughey in the PG-13 Stephen King adaptation “The Dark Tower” is unlikely to evoke deathly shivers so much a terminal case of the giggles.
“I hope you don’t mind me making myself at home,” Walter says to a couple whose kitchen stove he has just commandeered, after materializing from the alternate dimension in which he lives. “Where I come from, we don’t have chicken.”
Bada-bing. Later, when he resumes his campaign of universal annihilation — because, as previously noted: Bad Guy — Walter quips, brightly, “Have a great apocalypse.”
There is nothing great
— or even particularly apocalyptic — about “The Dark Tower.” Inspired, in only the most generous sense of the word, by King’s violent, eight-volume, supernatural-western fantasy series, the film by Nicolaj Arcel (“A Royal Affair”) is a watered-down, kids-movie version of Kingly horror.
Walter’s brooding nemesis, the equally fashion-forward Roland Deschain, aka the Gunslinger (Idris Elba), isn’t even the movie’s true hero, although he has been stalking Walter, pistols blazing, since time immemorial. (Roland’s guns are said to have been forged from the steel of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, but that doesn’t make their bullets lethal to Walter, who catches them in his hand, like fly balls.)
In a sop to its apparent target audience, the main protagonist of “The Dark Tower” is a troubled tween named Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), who seems to have accidentally wandered into this movie from the set of a young adult drama about alienation.
As the movie opens,
Jake has been having vivid nightmares in which he sees Roland do battle with Walter. As illustrated in the film’s dreamlike prologue, Walter has been kidnapping children and hooking them up to a high-tech contraption that harnesses their psychic energy to create a laserlike beam that he uses to chip away at the titular Dark Tower, a mysterious, linchpinlike skyscraper that somehow holds together the film’s various multiverses.
“The Dark Tower” isn’t frightening, or even, despite some serviceable action and special effects, very interesting, except perhaps for viewers too young to know better, or for King fans especially susceptible to outright pandering. The film seems to have been driven less by a coherent screenplay than by a desire to stir together miscellaneous scraps from the universe of King’s novels and films.
King’s “Dark Tower” series has been called his magnum opus, a great work that attempts, in its sprawling ambition and 4,000-plus pages, to tie together many details from his literary oeuvre. But the only part of that description that applies in this case is “work.”
This movie is a chore to sit through.