A movie doesn’t have to be rated “R” to be scary, but it should have a villain who doesn’t remind you of the test-tube love child of Voldemort and a second-rate stand-up comic.
As the wisecracking, well-coiffed demonic sorcerer Walter Padick - also known as the Man in Black, thanks to his self-explanatory attire - Matthew McConaughey in the PG-13 Stephen King adaptation The Dark Tower is unlikely to evoke deathly shivers.
“I hope you don’t mind me making myself at home,” Walter says to a couple whose kitchen stove he has just commandeered. “Where I come from, we don’t have chicken.” Later, when he resumes his campaign of universal annihilation, Walter quips: “Have a great apocalypse.”
There is nothing great or particularly apocalyptic about The Dark Tower. Inspired by King’s violent supernatural-Western fantasy series, the film is a watered-down, kids-movie version.
Walter’s brooding nemesis, Roland Deschain, aka the Gunslinger (Idris Elba), isn’t even the movie’s true hero, although he has been stalking Walter since time immemorial.
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.
Jake has been having nightmares in which he sees Roland do battle with Walter. As illustrated in the film’s prologue, Walter has been kidnapping children and hooking them up to a contraption that harnesses their psychic energy to create a laser-like beam that he uses to chip away at the titular Dark Tower, a skyscraper that somehow holds together the film’s multiverses.
Jake lives in modern-day New York, or rather in the movie’s rendering, on Keystone Earth, while Roland and Walter inhabit a wasteland known as Mid-World, which seems to contain both medieval villages and Walter’s lair, staffed by sycophantic, bumbling minions out of a live-action version of Despicable Me. Are you still reading?
The Dark Tower isn’t frightening or, despite some serviceable action and special effects, very interesting. It 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.
References to Pennywise the clown from It and to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining are scattered throughout. Even Jake’s powerful clairvoyant ability - referred to as the “Touch” in King’s books - is here called the “Shine”.
Other ingredients, in addition to the obvious Harry Potter influence, include Star Wars and every cowboy cliché known to man.
King’s Dark Tower series has been called his magnum opus, a great work that attempts to tie together many details from his literary oeuvre. But the only part of that description that applies in this case is “work”.
In the build-up to the release of The Dark Tower, fans of the series were worried that the movie’s brisk running time would under-serve the books’ grand themes.
When the house lights come up, no one is going to wish they could sit through a minute more of this chore.