The Dark Tower

An oddball adaptation with few similarities to its source material, The Dark Tower follows plucky teen Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) as he’s thrust into an alternate universe where a gunslinger (Idris Elba’s Roland) is hunting a mysterious, deadly figure known as the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey). It’s fairly interesting to note that even if one has read Stephen King’s 1982 novel, The Dark Tower, for the most part, makes exceedingly little sense and suffers from a pervasive lack of background information – which paves the way for a far-from-involving narrative that’s rife with head-scratching plot developments and underdeveloped characters. (In terms of the latter, for example, it’s never entirely clear what’s at stake for Taylor and Elba’s respective protagonists.) There is, as such, hardly anything contained within the padded-out proceedings worth getting excited about or invested in, with this issue ensuring that certain sequences are simply unable to make the visceral impact that director Nikolaj Arcel is clearly striving for. (This is especially true of a well-executed yet context-free action scene in an old-timey village, with the ineffectiveness of this interlude ultimately emblematic of the half-baked production’s problems.) And although Arcel does manage to sprinkle in a handful of entertaining moments here and there – Roland’s fish-out-of-water exploits in New York City are an obvious highlight – The Dark Tower, which closes with a hopelessly ineffectual climax, comes off as a fairly misbegotten adaptation that seems unlikely to pave the way for future installments.

** out of ****