Retro Movie Review: Tales from the Crypt, Demon Knight (R – 92 minutes - 1995)

We’ve rolled into October, and tis the season for horror flicks.  Honestly, I’m not much for horror movies, but I thought it would be fun to go back and review one a week that I actually did like.  

Horror has really become a wide-ranging genre with all sorts of sub-genres.  The first one I’m picking is a throwback to silly, slimy, gore and was a spin-off of the anthology series Tales From the Crypt that used to air on HBO – hosted by the Cryptkeeper, a corpse who made terrible puns, and I mean terrible puns.

Demon Knight starts in New Mexico where scuzzy drifter Frank Brayker is trying to outrun the handsome and elegant 'Collector'.  After a car crash, Brayker flees and ends up at a decommissioned church that has been converted into a boarding house and is currently filled with a fairly standard horror movie random group of characters: drunk Uncle Willy, owner Irene, prostitute Cordelia, postal clerk Wally, and a convict on work release – Jeryline.  Another local, ‘Roach’, shows up and tells the occupants that someone has tried to steal his boss’s car, and Irene calls the sheriff.  The sheriff and his deputy have encountered the Collector at the crash site – and he’s so charming that they immediately agree to help him out, as he was chasing a thief who has an important artifact.  The three of them arrive at the boarding house, where the sheriff decides to arrest both Brayker and the Collector, based on Brayker's reaction to the Collector.  The Collector is less than thrilled with this information and punches right through the sheriff’s head.

Brayker uses the artifact, a key-like item with a liquid inside, to force the Collector outside, then uses the slightly glowy red liquid inside to seal the entrances to the building against the Collector and the demon hordes he swiftly raises by flinging his blood around - eww.

 Brayker tells the group they will have to wait out the night and that the Collector will try to get inside the building by approaching each of them.  Sure enough, one by one, the Collector attempts to ‘seduce’ each person by offering them what they want.  He psychically seduces Cordelia, who then kills Wally and removes Irene’s arm before Brayker can kill her.  Just as the group is thinking they can escape through some old mine tunnels, they encounter Danny – a local kid, who is on the run from the other townspeople who are all now demon possessed and whatnot.  They demand the full story from Brayker, and he tells them what the artifact is.

After God created the earth, demons used seven keys to focus the power of the cosmos – God stopped them by creating light, which of course, scattered the demons and the keys.  They key that Brayker has is the last one they have not found, and God had a thief named Sirach fill it with the blood of Jesus during the Crucifixion.  The key has been passed down through time, rendering the bearer ageless while they have it, and refilling it with their blood when they are mortally wounded, before passing it on to the next person.  Brayker received it during World War I.  

During the story, Danny disappears, and in the confusion of looking for him, Roach takes the key from Brayker. While searching the place, Irene and Bob discover a stockpile of weapons that Wally was going to use to attack the post office (this is back when that was a thing).  The Collector possesses Uncle Willy, and while battling him – Roach attempts to trade the key for his life.  That goes how you would expect it to (hey, don't try to bargain with demons or collectors that work with demons - it never works, and they will always betray you) – and while the Collector kills Roach, Brayker gets the key back as Irene and the deputy sacrifice themselves so that Brayker, Jeryline and Danny can make it to the attic. 
The Collector manages to possess Danny (I mean, what kid can withstand demon possession?) who mortally wounds Brayker before Jeryline kills him. Brayker passes the key to Jeryline, leaving her to battle the Collector and continue on.  She does manage to defeat him, and refills the key with Brayker’s blood before heading out, sealing the door of a bus as she gets on – ensuring that a new Collector at the next stop cannot get on the bus. 

Directed by Ernest R. Dickerson (Juice, Bulletproof, The Wire, Dexter, Treme, Walking Dead, Bosch), the movie is more fun than it should be, and actually has a much better story than it should as well.  The set of the boarding house was completely built in one sound stage allowing for great movement through the sets.  I love the practical makeup on the demons and possessed folks, which are yes – horrifically and unnecessarily gory.  As much as I liked the story, and thought it was interesting and well done, it’s really the cast that sucked me into this movie.

• The star is definitely Billy Zane as the Collector – completely free to be completely zany (see what I did there?) he spends the movie harassing the occupants of the boarding house in various ways, including a nonsensical hoedown dance for no reason.  He seems to be genuinely having a great time. He’s perfect as the agent of darkness sent to collect the key by whatever means necessary.  Watch it again to see that part where he kisses the slimy demon on the forehead.

• William Sadler is very Sadler-y as Brayker, a man who has been running from the Collector for a long time. He’s beaten and tired, and I think relieved that he has found Jeryline to pass on the key and the responsibility that comes with it.

• Jada was still just Jada Pinkett at this point, not yet Jada Pinkett Smith.  She’s perfect as the convict who is just working out her sentence and tries to act like she doesn’t care about anyone or anything in this house, but is revealed to be the true hero of the story.

• Thomas Haden Church plays Roach, scummy, creepy, and slimy.  He gets what’s coming to him, but not without getting a few laughs first.

• John Schuck plays the Sheriff and Gary Farmer plays Deputy Bob, who steps up to help save everyone near the end.

• CCH Pounder (my favorite Amanda Waller) plays Irene, and has easily one of the best moments in the movie. After losing her arm – the Collector attempts to offer it back to her if she will assist him in getting the key.  She lifts her stump up to him, and he asks if that’s her agreeing, and she replies that it’s actually her giving him the finger. Classic.

• Brenda Bakke plays Cordelia, and Charles Fleischer plays Wally – which was interesting to see because previous to this I had only known him as the voice of Roger Rabbit.

• Dick Miller plays Uncle Willy – a dude who loves his bottles, and gets seduced by the Collector when offered drink and women – and yes, here’s the PTS in the movie.

Overall, it’s cheesy, it’s silly, it’s fun, and it has an interesting story.  Plus, Billy Zane.  Come on.  If you’re looking for some flashback entertainment this Halloween season, give this one a shot.  Then you could follow it up with Tales From The Crypt’s Bordello of Blood – but I personally prefer this one.

8 out of 10 – there’s no accounting for taste, I suppose!

Movie Review: Kingsman: The Golden Circle (R – 141 minutes)

I was surprised by how much I liked Kingsman: the Secret Service in 2014, despite having been a fan of several Matthew Vaughn movies including Layer Cake and Stardust. It was almost a James Bond spoof, with lots of campy violence and action as Eggsy, a street-wise tough, was indoctrinated into the Kingsman, an independent intelligence agency based out of a tailor shop in London.  With the assistance of his mentor, Harry (who was killed in the process), he successfully saved the world from Richmond Valentine’s plan to cull the human population of the world by releasing a free sim card that sent out radio frequency waves that made everyone homicidal maniacs and only those who Valentine chose would survive thanks to a little chip implanted in their heads.  Eggsy and the Kingsman saved the day by reversing the signal, and everyone with the chip had their head exploded.  It was absolute crazy fun. Check out the Honest Trailer from Screen Junkies below:

This time around, things are just as crazy, but less fun.  Eggsy is doing just fine as a spy, working with the Kingsman, Roxy, and Merlin (their version of Q) while wooing his girlfriend, the crown Princess of Sweden, Tilde.  This movie starts with Eggsy tussling with an ex-Kingman recruit, Charlie, who lost an arm during the last movie.  Well, now he has a prosthetic, which pops off during the fight, and manages to hack the Kingsman system. This leads to all Kingsman headquarters everywhere being wiped out while Eggsy is at dinner with Tilde and her parents. He finds that Merlin is fine, but Roxy and his dog, and his friend who was dogsitting, are dead.  He and Merlin follow a ‘doomsday protocol’ that leads them to a whiskey distillery in Kentucky run by ‘Statesman’, which they swiftly learn is their counterpart organization.  Not only that, but Statesman has Harry, who they apparently rescued after he was shot in the first movie.  This is not a spoiler, as it has been in every trailer (the marketing for this movie was omnipresent and gave away far too much).  Harry has amnesia, and is totally useless, until Eggsy reminds him who he was by threatening to shoot a puppy, a callback to the puppy-shooting fake-out bit from the first movie (which I hated there, and continue to hate here – surely there was another way to demonstrate loyalty?).

They learn that the person behind the attack is Poppy Adams, a drug kingpin who runs the largest drug cartel in the world, and has laced all her recreational drugs with poison, and will only release the antidote once the President of the U.S. legalizes all recreational drugs, so that she can be a legitimate businesswoman, and recognized for her greatness.  No, seriously, that’s her plan. The remaining Kingsman have to work together with their newly found Statesman allies to find the antidote and stop Poppy. 

Matthew Vaughn’s signature slow-mo crazed action sequences are still on display here, and yes, the hand to hand combat scenes are fantastic.  The issue is that while the first movie had just the right amount of camp and silly mixed with over-the-top action and performances, this movie seems to turn all of that up another notch – which goes too far and makes the movie disjointed and almost uncomfortable to watch.  There is little to no logic in anyone’s plan (there are several parties each with their own plans), Harry’s reintroduction feels forced, there are too many characters, and too many side missions.

• Taron Egerton once again plays Eggsy and he is very good in that role, but in a strange way for the lead of the movie, has very little growth character-wise.  He is game with the material, but the material is odd.

• Edward Holcroft returns as Charlie, and was certainly a good choice for the main henchman for Poppy.  The hand to hand battles between he and Eggsy were exciting and well done.

• Colin Firth returns as Harry, who has amnesia for a bit, then spends the rest of the movie trying to get back in the swing of things while hallucinating butterflies.  I think the movie would have been stronger without him – not his fault, just no real reason for the character to be back, and lessened the impact of one of the most shocking moments in the first movie.

• Julianne Moore plays Poppy Adams, the drug mogul who lives in a recreated 50’s town in the middle of the Cambodian jungle.  Her performance was great, but her plan is ridiculous.  

• Mark Strong returns as Merlin, and does a wonderful job of supporting Eggsy and trying to keep everyone on task.

• Hanna Alstrom returns as Tilde, I’m not sure this side-storyline was necessary either, but without it, Eggsy would literally have no character arc whatsoever.

• In terms of the Statesman crew, they are led by Jeff Bridges, who is doing the same character he has been playing since True Grit except for a change here, he has no mustache.  He has very little to do but promise to help the Kingsman and tell his agents where to go while spouting odd southern metaphors.

• Pedro Pascal plays agent Whiskey, and he was wonderful with what he was given, but again, what he was given was nonsense.  His plan doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I did enjoy his lasso work.

• Channing Tatum has a glorified cameo as Agent Tequila.  This is a little confusing, because all the marketing features Tatum heavily, when really – it’s more of a Pedro Pascal vehicle.

• Halle Berry plays Ginger Ale, their tech person, so she gets some paired scenes with Merlin that are charming and fun.

• Elton John plays Elton John, and may have been the best part of the movie.

Vaughn has stated he would do another one with the Rock as the villain.  There’s also the possibility of a Statesman spin-off with Tatum actually in it.  Who knows what will come next.  This one did have some fun moments, some great action – but was way too long, and just over did it.  Here’s hoping if they do another one, it is shorter and a little tighter story-wise.

6 out of 10.  Loved the action, wasn’t thrilled with the story.

Bonus -
Here's the LAMBcast review of the movie that I joined to discuss the movie with other LAMB members!   https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/lambcast/episodes/2017-09-27T01_04_09-07_00

Seventh Son is a particularly terrible movie with both Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore in it - be sure to check that out; 

Movie Review: American Assassin (R – 111 minutes)

Mitch Rapp is a counter-terrorist operative that is the starring character of fifteen novels by Vince Flynn. American Assassin is actually the 11^th book in the series, but since it is a prequel, detailing the origin story of Mitch Rapp, it made sense to turn this one into a movie before the others.

The movie opens with Mitch and his girlfriend on a beach vacation, just as he proposes to her, the beach is attacked by terrorists, and she is killed.  Mitch becomes consumed with vengeance and spends the next 18 months training himself in all types of combat and undercover techniques. He manages to infiltrate the cell of the terrorist who killed his girlfriend, and just as he is meeting him, the site is hit by a CIA team, and Mitch is “rescued” and his target killed. Mitch is very upset he didn’t get to kill him himself.

Mitch is interviewed by Irene Kennedy, who lets him know they’ve been watching him and used him to track down the cell. Mitch is unimpressed, and fully convinced he can continue working on his own. Irene talks him into going into CIA training to work for them in a black-ops off-the-record team called Orion trained by hard-as-nails ex-Navy Seal Stan Hurley.  Mitch proves apt, and while he and Victor, another member of the team, are excelling, a former trainee of Stan goes a bit rogue in Europe, stealing pieces of a nuclear weapon that they believe he will sell to the Iranian government so that they can use it against Israel.

In an attempt to track down the bomb and stop the sale, Stan, Victor, and Mitch team up with a Turkish operative, Annika.  As Mitch proves both his effectiveness and his inability to follow orders, they get closer to learning Ghost’s (the ex-trainee) plan.  Stan gets captured, and Ghost takes out some old grudges with a brief round of torture as Mitch and Annika step up to rescue him and stop the bomb.

The movie is directed by Michael Cuesta, and while the action and fight sequences are pretty great, the still scenes were a little odd for me.  There was a lot of characters talking directly to the camera as they were addressing another actor in a scene, which felt a little strange.  The movie was certainly fine as an action piece, in terms of setting up a franchise, I suppose we’ll see – the cast is game enough.

• Dylan O’Brien stops running mazes long enough to play Mitch Rapp.  He actually does a great job of playing Mitch as completely and totally devoted to killing as many terrorists as possible because he’s consumed with the loss of his fiancée. It works for this one, but if he goes on in this role, he’s going to need to be a little more fun to watch.

• Michael Keaton plays Stan Hurley and is perfect.  He’s grim and gruff and seems totally unimpressed with Mitch’s personal vengeance. He is the typical stoic mentor for this type of movie.  He even gets to go a little Keaton-crazy while Ghost tortures him ("You wanna get nuts? Let's get nuts!).

• Sanaa Lathan plays Irene Kennedy, and while I still think of her as Blade’s mom, she does a good job of reminding everyone she’s in charge and what the goal is. It’s a pretty typical role for this type of movie, and she does it well.

• Shiva Negar plays Annika, and she was actually one of the more interesting parts of the movie.  Are her intentions pure? What side is she really on?  She was great in the action sequences and even more interesting in the quiet moments.

• Taylor Kitsch plays Ghost, and really is the typical action-spy movie bad guy, frustrated at the country that left him to die in the field – even though that’s exactly what he signed up for.

• Scott Adkins plays Victor, and it was very cool to see him add another larger, speaking role here after years of stuntwork.  He does play the typical role in a movie like this of the ‘other-guy-in-training’ who is set up as opposite our lead. He’s by the book while Mitch is about following his own instincts.

Overall, the movie is just fine – it’s nothing spectacular, and nothing terrible.  You’ll notice a lot of the character breakdowns above are the ‘typical’ role for these types of movies. That’s not a problem if it is executed well, and this one is executed decently. I’m not familiar with the novels, so I can’t say whether or not this one is true to the book. I will say I appreciate the game plan of casting someone younger as the lead who they can build a potential franchise around. Because there are so many action franchises already out there, this one will need something different to help set it apart.  The counter-terrorism angle is unique, and has potential, but the movie will need to be a little more well-rounded to gain a following.  This one is incredibly somber and morose. That works well, but in order to build a franchise, you do need to like the main character, and right now – Mitch is a little bland.

6 out of 10, certainly passable.

Bonus – It’s very Jack Ryan-y, so go back and check out Hunt for the Red October, Patriot Games, or Clear and Present Danger.

Movie Review: The Hitman’s Bodyguard (R – 118 minutes)

Both Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds have proved to be action capable, and comically irreverent.  I suppose it was inevitable that they would end up paired in an action comedy, and I for one, am grateful they did.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard has a very simple story.  Former Ukrainian president Vladislav Dukhovich is currently on trial at the Hague for crimes against his people specifically and humanity in general. However, conveniently, all the witnesses against him keep turning up dead or unreliable.  He’s about to get away with horrific crimes and go back to ruling his country when Interpol decides to get international assassin-for-hire Darius Kincaid to testify against him.  They already have him in prison, along with his wife.  In exchange for his testimony, they agree to let his wife go free.  During the transfer from Manchester the convoy is attached, and agent Amelia Roussel realizes she cannot trust any of her own team, and calls in her ex – Michael Bryce, former AAA rated professional bodyguard to get Kincaid to the Hague to testify in time.  Along the way, the two first hate each other, but then come to a begrudging respect as they help each other realize their own flaws.  Of course, hijinks ensue. 

Directed by Patrick Hughes (Expendables 3), it’s a simple straightforward story that really reminds me of the buddy action movies of the 80s and 90s – Tango and Cash, 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, Showdown in Little Tokyo, etc.  It feels a bit like a throwback to those in that the violence is big, the action is top level, the stakes are high, the villain is incredibly intense and terrifying, and the comedy is outrageous and slapstick-y.  This is a trope I have always enjoyed, so I appreciate this movie as well.  It’s not perfect, but it’s entertaining - especially that each new character gets a slow reveal - meaning the camera starts at their feet as they get out of a vehicle or enter a room, then slowly moves up as they turn around. It happens several times in this movie. As with those older movies – this one works because of the cast, and their chemistry with one another.

• Ryan Reynolds plays Ryan Reynolds – I mean Wade Wilson – I mean Michael Bryce.  Honestly, the name doesn't matter, he’s a very Ryan Reynolds-y type, and that works well here.  Capable and sarcastic, he mistakenly blames his ex, Agent Roussel, for his sudden downturn in work and respectability.  One adventure with Kincaid helps him realize that she was not to blame and he needs to apologize to her.  

• Samuel L. Jackson plays Samuel L. Jackson – I mean Darius Kincaid.  He curses his way through the movie (122 times), which is exactly what you want from Samuel L. Jackson – his interactions with Reynolds are fantastic, and the action sequences are even better.

• Elodie Yung plays Amelia Roussel – and she’s great in the beginning firefight during the attack on the convoy, but then she basically disappears for the majority of the movie until she reappears at the end.  She’s great with the action, but since the movie is about the two leads, she gets less to do.

• Salma Hayek plays Sonia Kincaid, all firey Latina anger.  Her performance seems to live right in the zone between way over-the-top, and in line with the story – but edging closer to over-the top. She bosses around the Interpol agents, and yells at her husband, even though she’s very much in love with him.

• Gary Oldman plays Vladislav Dukovich, and he is completely and totally terrifying. This villain could easily be in a more serious movie, but his dastardly-ness works in favor here, never letting the movie go completely into comedy mode – keeping the action on point and making the stakes real.  With any other actor, this would have felt like it didn’t belong in this movie, but for some reason, Oldman makes it work.

• Joaquim de Almeida shows up as an Interpol agent who (surprise) is actually working for Dukovich and is the mole in the department.  When this was first introduced, I did expect a side-storyline of Roussel searching for the mole, and a bit of cat and mouse between her and de Almeida – but that does not happen at all – she figures it out right at the end.

Overall, the movie is just fine, a perfectly serviceable late summer action-comedy flick.  The chase sequences in Amsterdam were fantastic, and the final confrontation between all parties during Dukovich’s trial were also fantastic.  It was definitely enjoyable, as long as you don’t expect too much.

7 out of 10 – gained points for Oldman, but lost points for not having outtakes over the end credits – you know more than half of the Reynolds/Jackson interactions were improv and I wanted to see more of that!

Bonus – cast interviews:

Movie Review: The Big Sick (R – 120 minutes)

I have been a fan of Stand-up comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon for some time, they have a podcast called “The Indoor Kids” that deals mostly with video games that is very entertaining.  Then Kumail started showing up in various movies, and got a large role as Dinesh on Silicon Valley – a really funny HBO comedy. 

Kumail and Emily worked together to write a screenplay loosely based on the way they met and fell in love.  It’s an interesting story, and really makes for an exceptional movie.

Kumail is working as a stand-up in Chicago, driving for Uber when not ‘gigging’.  His family is steeped in Pakistani tradition, and would prefer him to have an arranged marriage to a nice Pakistani girl, like his brother.  Seemingly once a week, they have him over for dinner, and his mother has a girl “stop by” so that he can meet her.  While performing a set one night, a girl in the audience loudly reacts, and this leads to them having a brief but flirtatious encounter after the set.  They quickly begin dating, and seem very happy together.

Eventually Emily learns that Kumail has not yet told his family about her, because his parents are so insistent that he marry a Pakistani woman they choose.  This upsets her, because she has told her parents all about him.  They break up, and while broken up, Kumail receives a call from one of her friends stating that she is in the hospital, and needs someone with her.

As he visits her, her condition worsens, and he has to call her parents to come in to be with her as she is put into a coma so that doctors can analyze the situation.  Over the course of her coma, as her health gets better, then worse, then better again – Kumail gets to know her parents, gets a career opportunity, and learns to be clear with his own parents about what he wants from his life, and how important Emily is to him. 

The movie is fun, charming, and touching.  Directed by Michael Showalter (a veteran of The State comedy troupe), the movie is fairly fast paced for something where one of the two leads spends a lot of time in a coma.  The emotions feel genuine, and the cast is just wonderful.

• Kumail Najiani has been so good for so long, it’s great to see him really get to step into the spotlight with this movie. 

• Zoe Kazan plays Emily, mostly because the real Emily is not an actor, and Zoe does a great job of playing her with a warmth that is
• Holly Hunter plays Beth, Emily’s mother, and Ray Romano plays Terry, Emily’s father.  They are fantastic as they slowly get to know and respect Kumail as they try to deal with their daughter’s illness.

• When Kumail asked his real father who he would like to play him in the movie, he wanted Bollywood legend Anupam Kher, who was also the father in Bend It like Beckham.  They actually got him, and he is really spectacular as a man who wants to uphold tradition, but also loves his son and wants him to be happy.  Zenobia Shroff plays Sharmeen, Kumail’s mother, who is really just focused on getting him married.  Adeel Akhtar plays Kumail’s brother Naveed.

• Bo Burnham, Aidy Bryant, and Kurt Braunohler all play versions of themselves as comedians in Kumail’s circle of friends who offer advice and insults at varying points. David Alan Grier has basically a cameo as the comedy club owner, Andy Dodd.

Overall, the movie is at times hilarious, and at times really emotional.  It’s the best ‘little’ movie I’ve seen this year, and everyone should check it out.  It started in a limited release, so it’s still playing here and there.  Go see it, you’ll enjoy it.

9 out of 10 – gained points for the pictures of Kumail and Emily’s real wedding over the end credits.  Fantastic!

Cast Interviews from THR!

Movie Review: The Dark Tower (PG13 – 95 minutes)

The original “The Dark Tower” series is a series of eight books written by Stephen King that basically ties together all his stories into one ‘universe’.  Initially, he visualized the lead ‘gunslinger’ as a “Clint Eastwood” type who travels the worlds looking to eliminate the “man in black” who is planning to destroy the tower – which is holding back darkness from the universe.  The first book was published in 1982.

The series has been kicked around as either a movie or TV series idea for several years, but has fallen through many times because the material is a bit overwhelming.  This movie version tries to be epic, but ends up falling flat.

The story begins with a boy, Jake, struggling in life in our world – getting bullied in school because he’s dealing with the recent death of his father. His mother is remarried, and he spends most of his time drawing sketches of his dreams or visions. He continually dreams of a man in black using children to attack a tower, and of a gunslinger who is attempting to stop him.

Eventually, Jake gets some creepy messages from both his visions and a random homeless guy, and figures out that he is being followed by ‘skins’, creepy demons wearing human masks.  You can pick them out because of the seam in the flesh on their necks.  One day, his mom and step father are attempting to ship him off to a ‘facility’ where he can ‘get the help he needs’, but he recognizes the attendants there to pick him up as ‘skins’, so he runs away to a house he saw in his visions. Once in the house, he defeats the house demon (no, I have no idea how, or even why there is a house demon, or really, what the house demon’s deal was – protecting the house?), punches a code into what seems to be a stargate generator, and transports into another world.

Jake runs into Roland, the gunslinger, and tells him about his visions and where the man in black, Walter, is, and what he is doing.  Together, he and Roland head off through a desert, then a creepy forest where they encounter a demon who fakes being both of their dead fathers, then a village with a seer.  The seer lets everybody know that Walter is after Jake because Jake has a very powerful “shine”, which seems to be telepathy, with limited telekinesis. Walter can use him to attack the tower because his mind is more powerful than others.  Walter sends some bounty-hunter-style demons to attack the village looking for Jake, but he and Roland head off back to our world.

We then have a brief and hilarious sequence of Roland attempting to deal with our world, including attempting to pay for doctor services with a silver coin, telling party girls on a bus that they “have forgotten the faces of their fathers”, and getting excited about the surplus of bullets.   Quickly enough Walter figures out where they are, grabs the kid, and heads off to the ‘hub’ area to use Jake to attack the tower.  Roland has to fight through a collection of ‘skins’ here to get to the portal, and defeat Walter to grab Jake – then the two of them set off on more adventures.

The movie is directed by Nikolaj Arcel; and while parts of it are interesting, the majority of it is really disjointed and unnecessarily complicated.  It feels like they tried to fit in way too much, and ended up cutting everything a bit short, so nothing really has enough of an explanation.  The skins were interesting, but we never get to know anything about them.  Exactly how is Walter using kids to fire bolts of power at the tower?  What exactly will happen if the tower falls? Because Roland attempts to explain it with a stick, dirt circles, and a tarantula.  What are those skins doing on our world, just hanging out, or constantly hunting kids?  What was up with the folks in that village?  I feel like all of these questions may have been answered in the book, but I have never read it.  If you have, let me know if it better explains all of these random questions.  The cast is fine, and they execute the material, but no one really elevates it. 

• Idris Elba does what he can with what is there.  He’s fantastic at glowering, and even better at the action.  Honestly, I couldn’t help but be exceptionally irritated that he’s not James Bond, because watching him do the action in this, and saunter around in some fantastic costuming makes me realize he would be outstanding as Bond.  Dammit, Daniel Craig.

• Matthew McConaughey plays Walter, and slinks his way through the movie, avoiding twirling a mustache by chewing then scenery slowly.  He relishes the role and does a fine job, but since I really did not understand why he was doing what he was doing, aside from him wanting to unleash darkness, I found him uninteresting as a character.

• Tom Taylor was pretty good as Jake Chambers, his sadness at the beginning was offset nicely by his hope at the end.  I did find it puzzling that Roland tells him his “shine” is his weapon, and I wanted to see it used as a weapon – he uses it to communicate, and to hold a portal open, but I really wanted to see him dark phoenix with it and throw some skins around.

• Katheryn Winnick from Vikings plays his mother Laurie, and she’s fine, attempting to help her son, but also growing frustrated.  Walter did kill her off-screen, which was a little strange.

• Jackie Earle Haley plays Sayre – I did not know that character’s name until I looked him up on IMDB. Basically, he’s the skin demon stationed in New York to help hunt down kids and provide some exposition.

• Claudia Kim from Avengers Age of Ultron plays the seer Arra Champignon.  There wasn’t much there for her to do, so she was fine as she generally warned everyone after telling them Roland’s lineage (he’s from Arthur’s line, and his guns are made from the metal of ExCalibur!).

• Dennis Haysbert briefly appears as Roland’s father (he’s 63, Idris is 44), and he’s cool while he’s there to help Roland remember the Gunslinger's Creed.

• Fran Kranz plays Pimli – one of the skins operating Walter’s child-weapon-tower-blasting-hub location.

I didn’t like it very much, I don’t think that’s because the movie wasn’t good, I think it’s because it was too ambitious and took on too much.  I will say that they did walk a fine line – the movie could have fallen into “gun porn” – after all, the hero is a literal gunslinger.  However, they manage to be fairly careful about it, and not go overboard with the gun-love.  At one point he does hand the gun to the kid (which made me very uncomfortable), and lets him shoot it, but takes it back from him pretty quickly.  There were some things that were interesting and I wanted more of them, but the movie had to include so much, they couldn’t really explain the parts I found interesting, which ironically caused me to lose interest in the whole thing.

4 out of 10 – gained points for trying, and for Idris’s outfit.  Lost points for just about everything else, including how much McConaughey’s hair changes from scene to scene. He doesn’t even have that much hair.

Bonus – Here's the LAMBcast episode of Dark Tower, where I joined other LAMB members to discuss the movie! https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/lambcast/episodes/2017-08-10T07_18_01-07_00

Also - In case you forgot, in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Idris played a French monk.