By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
If you read Stephen King’s sprawling eight-novel saga, “The Dark Tower,” which reportedly took more than 30 years to assemble, you may understand what’s happening on-screen. If not, it’s an epic hit-or-miss proposition.
The story begins in earthquake-plagued Manhattan, where teenage Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is suffering horrific nightmares following the death of his firefighter father. When his mother (Katheryn Winnick) sends him to an asylum for psychiatric evaluation, he escapes, literally running for his life.
Apparently, Jake has vaguely defined but formidable psychic powers. He feels compelled to document his terrifying, apocalyptic visions in spooky sketches which include a mysterious Man in Black and an impassive hero known as the Gunslinger.
Finding his way to an abandoned house in Brooklyn, Jake stumbles through a portal into a surreal dimension known as Mid-World, where he not only encounters the trench coat-wearing Gunslinger (Idris Elba) but also the demonic Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey).
“His Shine is pure,” marvels the Man in Black. “His Shine is beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” concurs his cohort. Which means Jake’s brain contains the power to topple The Dark Tower, a spire that protects not only our planet, called Keystone Earth, but also other parallel worlds within our galaxy.
Meanwhile, the righteous Gunslinger keeps repeating a mantra: “I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.”
Assembled as a complex, completely confounding, mythological patchwork by four different screenwriters and director Nikolaj Arcel, it’s a choppy, incoherent hodge-podge of surreal chase/action sequences, a visual spectacle that’s confusingly edited.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Dark Tower” is a forgettable 4. For a sci-fi fantasy, it’s a sullen, superficial slog.
As the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, a behind-the-scenes spy thriller was unfolding, revolving around an “Atomic Blonde,” personified by undercover MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron), who was dispatched to retrieve information vital to the safety of Western intelligence.
As she’s debriefed by her handlers (Toby Jones, John Goodman), it’s revealed that another MI6 agent, James Gascoigne, had a list of every espionage officer in the city on both sides of the Cold War conflict.
When he was killed by a Russian agent (Johannes Johannesson), the list went missing. MI6 wants it back since it contains the identity of an infamous double-agent named Satchel.
To achieve her objective, Boughton must singlehandedly battle not only the KGB but also Stasi operatives, Allied spies and even rogue members of her own organization, like self-serving psychopathic David Percival (James McAvoy) and predatory Delphine Lesalle (Sofia Boutella), a sultry French operative who winds up in bed with her.
None of this poses much of a problem since Boughton’s fearless and ferocious, taking on teams of thugs and – in one memorable sequence – knocking them down a stairwell, one by one, while looking stunning in shiny thigh-high boots and sipping tumblers of Stoli-on-the-rocks.
Working from screenwriter Kurt Johnstad’s convoluted adaptation of Anthony Johnston’s graphic novel “The Coldest City,” stuntman-turned-director David Leitch (“John Wick”) trained Charlize Theron for three months to embody the emotionless, enigmatic heroine in stunning fight sequences, chronicled by French cinematographer Jonathan Sela to the beat of ‘80s Europop.
Battered and bruised, Theron traded her vanity for a swollen face and sealed-shut eye. Which is actually not surprising since she previously won an Academy Award playing a hefty serial killer in “Monster” (2003), directed by Patty Jenkins who subsequently helmed “Wonder Woman.”
On the Granger Gauge, “Atomic Blonde” is an adrenaline-propelled, smashing 6, steely and stylish.
For technology luddites and those who have never encountered a smartphone, “The Emoji Movie” features pictographs and ideograms that are used to convey electronic messages via texts.
Originating on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s, Emojis were popularized by Apple’s iPhone and soon adopted by Android and other mobile operating systems. Their popularity led to inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster.
Which undoubtedly led to Sony’s financing this $50 million animated feature. Co-written and directed by Tony Leondis, it’s obviously aiming for the same juvenile audience that crowded “The LEGO Movie.”
Set in Textopolis, a fanciful workplace within an adolescent boy’s smartphone, the story revolves around Gene (voiced by T.J. Miller), an emoji that was created without a filter, meaning he’s a nonconformist, able to express multiple emotions.
Gene’s task is to be the “meh” (or disinterest) symbol, but he wants to be more than just that. Which is why his sinister supervisor Smiler (voiced by Maya Rudolph) orders him terminated. Unwilling to accept his fate, Gene and his once-popular buddy Hi-5 (voiced by James Corden) go off in search of help.
Eventually, an error involving a punk hacker dubbed Jailbreak (voiced by Anna Faris) catapults Gene on a trip that allows him to get reprogrammed so he can be what the world wants him to be.
Being generous, this entire endeavor could be interpreted as a metaphor so that youngsters who feel they “don’t fit in” can experience comfort and camaraderie.
Product placements abound: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Candy Crush, Just Dance, Spotify, Dropbox and the Cloud. And whatever they paid British actor Sir Patrick Stewart to portray the Poop emoji, it’s a credit that will quickly be dropped from his resume.
On the Granger Gauge, “The Emoji Movie” is a mind-numbing 1 – cinematic malware, a total time-waster.
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
