Your movie review
JAMES Burgess is a 27-year-old performance, drama and theatre graduate. The former Fallibroome High School pupil has attended the BAFTA Film Awards in London every year since 2009, meeting stars including Dame Helen Mirren, Christian Bale, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emma Thompson. James lives on St Ives Close in Macclesfield. You can visit his website at jabfilmreviews. blogspot.com. white-hot levels of anticipation. King is his own king of the chiller: author of such seminal standalone classics as The Shining and Carrie as well as the equally hyped forthcoming clown horror IT – (in cinemas Friday, September 8), he’s in the midst of somewhat of a late-career reconnaissance.
Penning the adaptation is screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, a writer of striking visual aplomb: nineties Batman’s Forever and Robin, I Robot, I Am Legend, and more recently the muchmisunderstood A New York Winter’s Tale. It’s also produced by Ron Howard’s company, another nineties powerhouse, Imagine Entertainment.
It’s entertaining, and has stylish cinematographic touches of slow-motion, speedramped editing.
My screening wasn’t in 3D – but I’m glad the motif of so-called ‘bullet-time’ makes a return, even if the impact of those techniques is far more muted than I was expecting.
Perfectly enjoyable it may be, but in a commercially inconsistent summer of a very hyped, well-publicised slate of blockbusters: (Baywatch, Ghost In The Shell, even Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky unexpectedly flopped in the US) - Tower may suffer from the fact it could’ve been far more daring, sharper and scarier than it is – instead of being a very muddled confection.
It’s Taylor Hackford’s Devil’s Advocate, (nowhere near as gripping or edgy), mixed unevenly with more familyorientated versions of Jumanji or Zathura.
King purists may be doubly disappointed, not only by vast liberties taken with the source material, but also by rushed pacing, easy plotting choices made for convenience, and safe sanitisation of shocks in favour of securing a 12A audience - as opposed to making it darker and riskier.
Both Matthew McConaughey (terrific, stealing the show with a drawling malevolence as Walter - The Man In Black) and Idris Elba (dependably stoic), subtly and skilfully make the delivery of Goldsman’s often complex script look effortless.
But the dialogue is so needlessly didactic: “He has the boy! We must save him / I know!”.
But I hope to see more, and the effects are impressive.