Movie Review: Don’t Expect a Big Screen Sequel to Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower”

Hollywood spent so long wondering if they could make a Dark Tower movie, they never asked if they should make a Dark Tower movie.

They shouldn’t have.

Adapted from Stephen King’s eight-book, 4,250-page series of the same name, producers whittled down their early, aspirational plan for a film trilogy and a coinciding TV series to this, a 95-minute picture.

I couldn’t help but think of Maeby Fünke, the teen producer from Arrested Development, trying to hock a terrible slasher flick she kept cutting shorter and shorter to make it seem even remotely watchable: “It's the best 52 minutes you'll spend all day!”

Idris Elba plays Roland the Gunslinger, protector of the multi-verse, of which Earth is just one contributing slice. As The Dark Tower opens, he’s in pursuit of Walter, the Man in Black, played by a silly, de-McConaissanced Matthew McConaughey. Walter’s unbending posture, open-necked black V-shirt and tuft of fuzzy hair means he's less Mephistopheles and more Mr. Mistoffelees. When we see him prowling New York City, you wonder if he strolled off a Broadway production of Cats.

For reasons never made explicitly clear, the Man in Black is on an apocalyptic mission to destroy the Dark Tower that stands between all universes and which keeps the boundaries from tumbling down. On Earth, a psychic boy with “the Shine” (yes, like The Shining) dreams of Walter and the Tower, and is eventually sucked through a portal into Roland’s Mid-World. The Gunslinger reluctantly takes the kid, Jake (Tom Taylor), under his wing, and they set out to save the worlds. And if you want a more coherent explanation of the plot than that, you’re gonna need to turn elsewhere. Maybe Stephen King?

The Dark Tower

Perhaps even King—the legendary horror author who is responsible for several legit classic films, and many more that deserve to be flushed down the toilet after ol’ mate Pennywise—would be baffled. By all reports, screenwriters Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen and director Nikolaj Arcel have done his story a disservice in the translation to cinemas. I’ll have to take their word, since I didn’t read The Dark Tower beforehand, because as committed as I am to criticism, I’m not actively masochistic.

This archetypal good vs. evil tale is not entirely clumsy, nor is it even as muddled as it could have been, given the breadth of the source material. Rather, it feels slight and inconsequential, despite the apparently existence-altering stakes involved. For instance, Walter is attempting to choreograph multiple apocalypses across dimensions, and this is narratively and visually realised by a handful of human-looking alien beings operating a steampunk computer system.

Our hero’s mode of defence is not much more interesting: a pair of guns, forged from the sword of Arthurian legend, that still pretty much do what guns usually do. He rallies himself before every shot with a variation on the “guns don’t kill people” mantra, but Tom Holkenborg’s Inception-aping inspirational score is meant to tell you that, actually, this is all very moving. A final battle between the Gunslinger and the Man in Black—eons in the making—is simply a one-way shootout. Walter, the all-powerful warlock, defends himself by breaking shards of glass and using them as a hovering bullet-shield.

Look, imagination’s not for everybody.

Arcel’s last effort, A Royal Affair, is responsible for giving us Alicia Vikander and offering Mads Mikkelsen a rare romantic lead part, so he’s pardoned for all film-crime for at least another half-decade. And Elba strides away from the project—and let’s face it, aborted franchise—reputation intact. If The Dark Tower’s worth watching at all, it’s for the opportunity to see the Man Who Would Be Bond as a bona fide smouldering screen hero. Most criminally, this is basically the only option we’ve got.

2.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated M for science fiction themes and violence.