Movie Review: The Dark Tower

Hollywood has been trying to adapt Stephen King's expansive Dark Tower series for more than 10 years now, with many near misses along the way. While the resulting film is far from the embarrassment its venomous initial reception may indicate, it nevertheless stands as a case study of the inherent problems faced when attempting to bottle an ambitious, complex novelistic mythology for a broad movie audience.

Choosing where to begin was always going to be a challenge given the source material's complicated relationship with time, and the film decides to tell its story via Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), a boy in contemporary New York plagued by visions of a dystopian fantasy world, where an ominous evil figure exploits young children in his attempts to bring down the titular structure that is said to be holding back the boundless evil of the universe.

Chambers soon finds himself physically transported to this world, where he meets up with Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), the last in the line of Gunslingers, heroic figures destined to challenge The Man In Black (Matthew McConaughey) in his quest to bring down the Dark Tower.

Although the film has gone to great pains to simplify the back story, it nevertheless feels a little convoluted for the uninitiated. The implied significance of the events is usually clear, but rarely felt.

That said, you could never say it's boring. I was mostly carried along by its surprising evocation of '80s semi-classic The Neverending Story. Elba brings effortless weight to his relatively thin role, but Deschain's emotional journey is somewhat undercut by McConaughey's odd acting choices, which often reduce The Man In Black to a smirking jerk.

There's a surfeit of Stephen King references that are fun to identify, and more than one impactful set-piece, but it's clear that the mythic qualities of this story have been lost in the journey to the big screen.

Cast: Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey
Director: Nikolaj Arcel
Running Time: 95mins
Rating: M (Violence)
Verdict: Convoluted? Yes. Boring? No.

DID YOU KNOW...
In 2013, Ocean's 11 director Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from directing films. He decided to come out of retirement for Logan Lucky, which he describes as the "inversion of an Ocean's movie... it's an anti-glam Ocean's movie".