'The Dark Tower' - Review

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆  

Look, I get it: a one-star rating always looks very harsh. This one isn’t chiefly directed towards The Dark Tower for its technical faults (though they’re certainly plentiful), but at its total failure to bring anything new to the table whatsoever, or drum up the slightest inkling of interest in its soon-to-follow franchise. Apparently optioned by studio heads who thought cinema needed another book adaptation that turns potentially interesting source material into listless young adult fare, this hopeful sequel to an as-yet unmade TV series wastes its ammunition early.

Based very loosely on Stephen King’s eponymous series, the film follows young New Yorker Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), a mop-haired ‘Chosen One’ plagued by nightmares of a giant tower, the evil sorcerer bent on its destruction (Matthew McConaughey) and a gunslinger sworn to protect it (Idris Elba). Jake carries within him a mysterious power known as ‘The Shine’, which McConaughey’s Man in Black (or Walter, to use his hilariously underwhelming real name) wishes to harness against the tower at the centre of the universe. Upon its collapse, untold horrors from outside the realms of our reality will spring forth.

It seems irrefutable now that Interstellar marked the end of the so-called ‘McConaissance’: the Texan actor’s recent strain of underwhelming performances come to a head here with Walter, a drawling bore who, for all his (exceptionally badly-dubbed) expository dialogue, never actually explains what he stands to gain from letting all the nasties into our universe.

Elba doesn’t fare much better, mind. His natural charisma prevents Roland the gunslinger from becoming a total non-entity, though his backstory and relationship with Jake can essentially be summed up by the bit in Hot Fuzz when Danny asks Nicholas “Ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?”

Taylor is fine, but the screenplay never gives him an opportunity to express any awe at all the extraordinary sights revealed to him. When Jake first enters the gunslinger’s world through a portal (guarded by a floorboard monster, no less), there’s a brief pause for breath before he encounters Roland and then we’re off on a plodding expedition to the next plot point. The journey across alien landscapes and through the bowels of New York is notable only for a smug littering of references to other King works and – even in the constraints of a 90-minute movie – feels a slog.

There’s also some seriously misjudged darkness thrown in for good measure, too, for what 12a-certificate film wouldn’t be complete without child slavery, torture, skin-harvesting monsters and several-hundred gory gunshot wounds? This tonal patchwork – see-sawing between Walter burning innocent people to death and Roland discovering the delights of a certain branded cola – does nothing to stave off images of Akiva Goldsmith (Transformers: The Last Knight) and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) drafting their screenplay by squashing all seven volumes of King’s original story into a blender. Pity they didn’t do the same with their keyboards.