Genre: Action, Adventure, Fantasy
Director: Nikolaj Arcel
Cast: Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Dennis Haysbert, Jackie Earle Hayley, Ben Gavin, Claudia Kim
Runtime: 1h 35mins
Idris Elba plays the mystical gunslinger Roland Deschain in ‘The Dark Tower’. It should be the ripest of ripe blockbuster roles, given how much revenge, brooding, and wearing of a leather duster it entails. The duster is key, with plenty of swirls to it for all the times Roland ends up whipping around to shoot something, on one occasion reloading by catching a chamber full of bullets in mid-air. It’s dramatic but not as dramatic as the scene in which he takes out a baddie at a distance without turning his head, just sensing the shot with his powers. As the code that Roland recites goes, you kill with your heart – especially when it looks cool.
Walter (Matthew McConaughey) and Roland (Idris Elba) in THE DARK TOWER
Roland is the central character of the eight-book Stephen King series on which ‘The Dark Tower’ is based, a sprawling Western-fantasy-science-fiction-horror mash-up that various bigwigs (including J.J. Abrams and Ron Howard) have been trying to adapt for the screen for a decade. The movie that finally emerged from that development morass – one directed by Nikolaj Arcel, instead funnels its story through 11-year-old Jake (Tom Taylor), a troubled boy who lives in Manhattan, but who’s been dreaming about Roland and the world of magic and demons from which he comes. It’s a confounding decision on many levels – the most obvious of which is that when you have Elba playing some cowboy version of an Arthurian knight, why in the multiverse would you shift focus to an annoying kid?
Elba can’t seem to catch a break. He has been a movie star in waiting for years. ‘The Dark Tower’ is a lame-duck adaptation destined to excite book fans and bewilder everyone else, but at least it seemed poised to give the actor a prime spotlight. The fact that Elba gets consigned to being a surly sidekick and surrogate father figure as much as he is an action hero suggests that Hollywood still doesn’t know what to do with him. As villainous wizard Walter, Matthew McConaughey offers up what’s basically a more evil version of whatever he’s doing these days. Roland is just as underwritten, but Elba takes the opportunity to bring soulfulness to his barely sketched-out path to redemption – and when that fails, he still manages to be funny.
Those are, strangely, the best parts of ‘The Dark Tower’ – when, having failed to deliver the promised cool, the film opts for bits of fish-out-of-water business, leveraging the larger-than-life Roland again in present-day New York. Elba sells it with the timing and by playing Roland painfully straight, and in those moments, you can see the movie ‘The Dark Tower’ could have been – probably still a let-down for devotees of King’s series, but at least something fun. Elba alone can’t make ‘The Dark Tower’ worth watching. But he can make the case, yet again, that he deserves better material than this.
My Verdict
My Rating
1.5
When you have Idris Elba playing some cowboy version of an Arthurian knight in ‘The Dark Tower’, why in the multiverse would you shift focus to an annoying kid?
