THE DARK TOWER (US - 2017) Directed by Nikolaj Arcel. Written by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen and Nikolaj Arcel. Cast: Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley, Katheryn Winnick, Dennis Haysbert, Abbey Lee, Claudia Kim, Fran Kranz, Nicholas Hamilton, Jose Zuniga, Nicholas Pauling, Eva Kaminsky, Robbie McLean. (PG-13, 94 mins) After a decade in assorted stages of development and pre-production hell, with both J.J. Abrams and Ron Howard attached to direct at various times, the long-planned adaptation of The Dark Tower, a series of Stephen King novels that began with the publication of a short story in 1978, is finally a thing. And they mostly blew it. A labyrinthine series of books that get larger and more unwieldy and self-indulgent with each new volume, going so far as to include King himself as a character by the time it's all over, the entire saga is nearly 5000 pages long. Something that complex, with its own internal mythology and the large cast of characters, is impossible to streamline and still be effective and probably needs to be a TV series along the lines of GAME OF THRONES to realize its full potential in a visual medium. But in the hands of Danish director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel (best known for helming 2012's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner A ROYAL AFFAIR and scripting the original film version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO as well as the three DEPARTMENT Q movies), making his Hollywood debut, THE DARK TOWER is a jumbled, confused pastiche of the book series and other King tropes and references (a kid who "shines," someone walking a St. Bernard, a framed photo of the cinematic Overlook Hotel, a portal labelled "1408") that goes off on its own tangent, with the closing credits rolling at just under the 90-minute mark. At times feeling like a really long "Previously on..." recap of a DARK TOWER TV series that doesn't exist, Arcel and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen (MIFUNE, WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF, BROTHERS), who reworked an existing script from Abrams' and Howard's time with the project by, respectively, Jeff Pinkner (LOST, FRINGE) and human focus group response Akiva Goldsman, try to cram in as many recognizable "Dark Tower"-related things as possible to keep the die-hards happy. King adaptations don't need to be faithful to work on their own terms--THE SHINING is proof of that--but the makers of THE DARK TOWER blowtorch through the exposition so quickly, with no context or frame of reference, that the whole thing will come off as either completely incoherent to anyone who hasn't read the books (I stopped after the third) or as pointless Dark Tower fan fiction to those who have. Arcel keeps the pace fast to a fault--almost certainly so you don't have a chance to ask questions until it's over, by which point you'll have forgotten most of it--and he gets a lot of mileage out of a well-cast star, but this thing is a total mess, and what could've been the beginning of an ambitious, epic big-screen franchise (that was the plan under Howard) ends up being 2017's JONAH HEX.
Still dealing with the death of his firefighter father in the line of duty, 12-year-old Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is haunted by visions in his dreams of another dimension where a huge tower keeps order in the universe. The tower is what stands in the way of the master plan of the nefarious sorcerer The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey), who rules Mid-World, a world of monstrous creatures in human masks who abduct psychic children, the only beings capable of destroying the tower, which is the Man in Black's plan to unleash the ultimate evil. No one believes Jake--not his sympathetic mother (Katheryn Winnick), his asshole stepfather (Nicholas Pauling), or his psychologist (Jose Zuniga)--and a vision of a dilapidated house leads him to a condemned building in Brooklyn, where he discovers a portal to Mid-World. After going through, he encounters Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), the last Gunslinger, sworn to avenge the death of his father (Dennis Haysbert) at the hands of the Man in Black. Armed with pistols forged from Excalibur (yes, that Excalibur), Roland takes Jake under his wing as they're pursued through Mid-World into Manhattan, on what Mid-Worlders call "Keystone Earth," just one of many dimensions that exist in the universe, of which the Dark Tower is the center of all planes of existence.
The script takes ideas from various points in the books and mashes them all into a barely coherent story. The Man in Black is also known as "Walter Padick," but it's not clear when he became the force of evil that he is (it seems like something pretty big has to happen to turn a guy named Walter into the ultimate manifestation of demonic evil), and the movie never even bothers to mention another of his identities in the book: Randall Flagg, the name of the antagonist in both The Stand and The Eyes of the Dragon. The Man in Black (this is not one of McConaughey's better performances) has some kind of sci-fi command center where he makes pithy comments to his underlings, all of whom seem to be completely incompetent, since he's constantly being beamed into Keystone Earth to take care of everything himself (example of how sloppy the finished film is: at one point, he makes a special trip to interrogate someone for information he was already made aware of a couple scenes earlier). The film was rushed through production and after some bad test screenings, underwent some hasty reshoots in an attempt to make sense of everything (three editors are credited), and about half of McConaughey's scenes appear to be from this second round of production, the major tell being that he has spiky bedhead in some scenes and a slicked-back, helmet-like wig in others, the production in such a mad rush to get done that they didn't even carefully monitor J.K.Livin's hair continuity. Other characters drift in and out with little purpose--Abbey Lee (MAD MAX: FURY ROAD) was described as "the female lead" in initial reports when she signed on, but her character is a mostly silent sidekick whose primary function is to stand beside by the Man in Black (or, if you prefer, Walter), and Jake's bullying school nemesis Lucas Hanson (Nicholas Hamilton) is reduced to about 30 seconds of screen time where he swipes Jake's sketch book and we never even get his name. Arcel essentially turns King's saga into a post-HUNGER GAMES/DIVERGENT/MAZE RUNNER YA adaptation, wasting a strong performance by Elba, who's very good in the action sequences and in the fish-out-of-water section when Roland goes through the portal and ends up in Manhattan. He and Taylor are apparently committed to a DARK TOWER TV series planned for 2018, which will hopefully be a more faithful take on King's saga than this misfire, which doesn't seem so much completed as it does abandoned. As far as Arcel is concerned, add him to the always-growing list of European filmmakers with cautionary tales of being seduced by Hollywood studios and a bigger budget than they've ever had only to find the film subjected to compromises, business decisions, and the fickle whims of test audiences, neutering any of the individuality and vision that got them the job in the first place, and sending them back home to regroup and focus on a small-scale, back to basics project.
THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES (Denmark/Germany - 2013; US release 2016)
Based on a series of six (to date) Department Q novels by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, 2013's THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES was the first of thus far three movie adaptations. Huge post-GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO hits in Scandinavia, the first three DEPARTMENT Q movies were released simultaneously in the US by IFC Films/Sundance Selects in the summer of 2016. Being in Danish with English subtitles, the films are relegated to the arthouse circuit, but they're very commercial police procedurals that will appeal to any fan of the original DRAGON TATTOO trilogy and American TV shows like LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT and more recent offerings like THE KILLING and TRUE DETECTIVE. Lone wolf homicide cop (is there any other kind?) Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is a plays-by-his-own-rules type who impulsively leads a raid on a perp's residence without waiting for backup. His impatience results in a shootout that gets one cop killed and his only friend Hardy (Troels Lyby) paralyzed, and Morck himself gets grazed by a bullet that leaves him with a scar on his forehead and noticeable tremors in his left hand. Morck's irate boss Marcus (Soren Pilmark) refuses to put him back on homicide and busts him down to Department Q, a newly-created cold-case unit buried in the basement. Morck's job is to sign off on two cases a week and Marcus sees it as a way to eliminate some bureaucratic red tape and keep Morck out of sight and out of mind, since no one likes him anyway. He's paired in Department Q with Assad (Fares Fares of ZERO DARK THIRTY), a good cop who's never been given a chance because anti-Muslim prejudice has made him as much of an outcast pariah to his colleagues as Morck. Assad sees this as an opportunity but Morck is furious and feels it's beneath him, until he becomes intrigued by the case of Merete Lynggaard (Sonia Richter), an aspiring politician who disappeared from a ferry five years earlier and was presumed to be a suicide by drowning. She was on the ferry with her Uffe (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard), her disabled, brain-damaged younger brother, and her body was never found.
Morck doesn't buy that Merete would kill herself and leave her brother alone on the ferry, and of course, he's right. She was abducted from the ferry and has been held captive for five years in a small, pressurized room. Morck and Assad butt heads and go through all the formulaic business that mismatched cop partners do (Assad doesn't understand why Morck is so miserable, while Morck can't stand Assad's coffee), but they very gradually form a grudging respect for one another as they dig deeper and deeper into Merete's past, uncovering info that the detectives who caught the case never bothered to pursue and incurring the wrath of Marcus, who just wants the cold cases closed but not necessarily investigated (of course, he reads them the riot act and makes them both hand over their badges and, like every movie cop who's ever been ordered to hand over his badge, they just carry on with the investigation on their own time). There isn't much in the way of surprises as far as characters and plot construction are concerned, but when these sorts of things are done right, they're pretty hard to resist, and THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES is fast-moving and thoroughly engrossing from the start, thanks to an economically-constructed and no-bullshit screenplay adaptation by Nikolaj Arcel. Arcel also scripted the original 2009 version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, wrote and directed the 2012 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-nominee A ROYAL AFFAIR, and will make his Hollywood debut in 2017 by writing and directing THE DARK TOWER, based on the first book in Stephen King's epic series. Produced by Lars von Trier's Zentropa Entertainments, THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES was directed by Mikkel Norgaard, best known to cult comedy fans for helming KLOWN and its sequel KLOWN FOREVER. Norgaard and Arcel would return for the 2014 sequel THE ABSENT ONE. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
THE ABSENT ONE (Denmark/Germany/Sweden - 2014; US release 2016)
With its central mystery dealing with a traumatic incident in the life of a teenage girl two decades back and a climax involving the heroes being held prisoner in a rich psycho's secret lair, THE ABSENT ONE can't help but draw comparisons to either version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Here, Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Assad (Fares Fares) are spinning their wheels in Department Q, earning scorn and disdain from fellow cops who dismiss them as "The Arab and the Drunk." At a party for their boss Marcus (Soren Pilmark), Morck is confronted by Henning Jorgensen (Hans Henrik Voetmann), a former cop whose career imploded when his twin son and daughter were murdered at an exclusive boarding school. One of their classmates, Bjarne Thorgersen (Kristian Hogh Jeppesen) was convicted, but only served three years thanks to a high-powered defense lawyer clearly out of Thorgersen's parents' price range. The surprisingly light sentence is enough to get Morck to take another look at the case, especially when he's overcome by guilt when Jorgensen commits suicide two hours after Morck has him thrown out of the party. Morck is convinced Thorgersen was the fall guy and he and Assad start looking at other students who were there at the time. Chief among the alumni is Ditlev Pram (Pilou Asbaek, best known to American audiences as Euron Greyjoy on GAME OF THRONES), the wealthy owner of a hotel chain and an all-around shitbag who still pals around with equally wealthy and even sleazier boarding school buddy Ulrik Dybbol (David Dencik, who was in the American remake of DRAGON TATTOO). Pram and Dybbol have a dark, murderous past they want kept under wraps, with Pram even going so far as to hire security expert and freelance hit man Alberg (Peter Christofferson) to kill Kimmie (Danica Curcic), who briefly dated Pram in school and whose life completely derailed into homelessness and prostitution after the murder of Jorgensen's twins. She knows something and Pram wants her dead, which sends Morck and Assad on a frantic search to find her.
THE ABSENT ONE isn't quite as good as THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES. The pace is slower, the presentation a little muddled, a subplot involving Pram's jealousy over his wife's extramarital affairs just bloats the running time, and the story just seems to be a too-formulaic variant on Stieg Larsson. Kaas and Fares are still a winning team who play well off one another (Morck still can't stand Assad's coffee), with Fares' Assad getting a bit more assertive when the situation calls for it. Morck and Assad are joined in the office by Rose (Johanne Louise Schmidt), their new secretary who proves to be a very observant and resourceful addition to the team and one who's hopefully used a little more in the next installment, A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH. (Unrated, 120 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH (Denmark/Germany/Norway - 2016)
Screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel was set to direct this third film in the DEPARTMENT Q series, but Hollywood beckoned with the offer to helm THE DARK TOWER, so the job was given to veteran Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, best known for the 1995 cult film ZERO KELVIN. While Mikkel Norgaard focused on the procedural elements of the investigation, Moland brings a more action-oriented sensibility to DEPARTMENT Q, with no less than two masterful chase/suspense set pieces--a ransom drop from a speeding train and a hospital pursuit of a killer disguised as a doctor--that rank among the most nail-biting sequences of 2016. If familiarity was already creeping in with THE ABSENT ONE, Moland definitely shakes things up with the faster pace and different, more outdoor setting of A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH, without skimping on the grim, grunt detective work that makes Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Assad (Fares Fares) such a solid team. As this film opens, Assad is temporarily overseeing things in Department Q with dutiful secretary Rose (Johanne Louise Schmidt), while a down and depressed Morck is on a medical leave following the events at the end of THE ABSENT ONE. When a literal message in a bottle is found washed up on a shoreline, the police bring it in to Assad, almost as a sarcastic joke considering how little respect Department Q gets from the rest of the force. Assad and Rose examine the cryptic eight-year-old message, written in blood, and mentioning "Jehovah." Judging from the misspellings and the grammar, Assad theorizes that it was written by a child and wants to investigate all cases of missing children from the last ten years, but a returning and intrigued Morck tells him there have only been two cases, both closed.
Meanwhile, in another town, a report is made of two siblings being abducted by a stranger in a car. Their parents, Elias (Jakob Ulrik Lohmann) and Rakel (Amanda Collin) belong to a tight-knit religious sect known as "The Lord's Disciples" and insist their kids are visiting Elias' sister. When that doesn't check out, Elias, who refuses to speak with Muslim Assad, confesses that the kids are being held for ransom by Johannes (Pal Sverre Hagen), a charismatic, phony minister who visited the area and took the children. Johannes also matches the description given to police by Trygve (Louis Sylvester Larsen), a 15-year-old who was kidnapped with his brother--who wrote the message in a bottle--eight years ago. Trygve managed to get away but his brother was killed by Johannes. Morck and Assad are convinced history is repeating itself, and that Johannes is a serial kidnapper and murderer. He's also a practicing Satanist who preys on fanatically religious families, usually correctly assuming they'll follow his directions because they have more faith in God and His plans than they do in the police. And in Johannes' twisted mind, by ruthlessly murdering children even after their parents have cooperated, he is robbing the religious of the faith they hold so dear. A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH is a bit thematically deeper than its predecessors, with atheist Morck and religious Assad engaging in a couple of thoughtful theological debates, but there's also some amusing and/or off-the-wall touches, like a short-fused Morck shutting down an enthusiastic forensics nerd who's more interested in explaining his technique than the results, and a church choir performing an oddly unsettling, Danish-language rendition of Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" at a baptism. With a memorably despicable villain in Hagen's Johannes, the chemistry between Kaas and Fares stronger than ever, some exciting action sequences, and a change in approach and style courtesy of Moland, A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH is the best entry yet in the DEPARTMENT Q franchise. (Unrated, 112 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
