This is why I was disappointed to hear that the recent movie adaptation was no good. Critics dumped on it for being non-sensical, fans dumped on it for straying so far from the books. Yet something made me throw it in the Netflix disc queue anyway to check out if it was as bad as everyone was saying.
At first, I didn't think so. When the short 90 minute movie ended, I thought, "well, that wasn't good, but it wasn't really as bad as everyone was saying." But by an hour later, I was thinking maybe it was. By the next day, I was questioning whether it was actually worse than everyone was saying. This movie has a hell of a half life, and not working in its favor.
The fans are closer to the mark on this one. The Dark Tower (the movie) isn't especially complicated or confusing. It's actually distilled down to the stories most formulaic elements. (Not its most essential elements; many of those were actually excised!) An evil villainous villain wants to destroy the universe, and needs to find a special kid to do it. The special kid is dreaming of the hero who will save him, and soon discovers those dreams are real. Action beats ensue.
So much is cut from the book that it's not even worth detailing. Instead, I have to ask why even bother to adapt material if the adaptation is going to be so faithless to the source? Sure, a 7-book epic was never going to fit into one film, and doing a straight up adaptation of the dull book 1 as movie 1 would not have been the right approach. Still, the movie tampers with everything from removing vital characters to actually changing the motivations of the ones who do appear. Nearly all the things that distinguished the tale get sanded off, leaving a generic fantasy adventure different only in that in partially takes place on Earth.
It's really a shame, because the core cast is pretty good. (Let's not stray beyond the core; no one else gets anything of substance to do.) Idris Elba plays gunslinger hero Roland Deschain, and does a remarkable job of layering a performance in a script that isn't very deep. He buries a long-forgotten nobility beneath a battered and world-weary exterior. He's every inch the hero you want to watch rise to the occasion, and he's thrilling when he does.
Matthew McConaughey is great as the evil Man in Black, Walter. There's a meta level to the performance, as he's quite mannered and restrained much of the time here. Yet we know that's hiding both real-life craziness and craziness that has leaked out on the screen before (ahem, The Wolf of Wall Street). You really do get the sense of a mask obscuring something awful, and when it does crack in moments, the sparks and menace are among the few compelling things about the movie.
Newcomer Tom Taylor plays young Jake Chambers, the kid at the heart of the story. The movie chooses to shift the books' perspective entirely from Roland to Jake, and only the consistency of Taylor's performance keeps me from adding that to the long list of changes that seem like a bad idea. It's pretty boilerplate "kid discovers he has powers" stuff, but the performance isn't lax or bored, it's making the best of what's there.
Three good performances aren't enough to save an otherwise paint-by-numbers snoozefest. Nor are the superficial details like gunplay sometimes substituting for magic, world-hopping back and forth to New York City, and so forth. People who aren't fans of The Dark Tower will wonder what the big deal is. Fans will just be disappointed. I give The Dark Tower a D+. Steer clear.
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