The Dark Tower film review ★★★★★

Like a hurricane in a junkyard, The Dark Tower flings all kinds of rubbish at you. Plot, dialogue, character – they fly around like old washing machines, threatening to knock your brains out. It’s a vortex of dumbness, and it goes on for ages. The best thing to do is keep your head down until the whole thing’s over.

It didn’t have to be like this, although it now seems almost inevitable that it would be. That’s not just us being cynical after the disappointment of the scatterbrained Valerian: there’s a such a strong sense of 2007’s The Golden Compass about The Dark Tower that it’s amazing no one saw its failure coming a mile off.


As with that adaptation of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ books, The Dark Tower takes a densely plotted and richly allusive series of novels (Stephen King’s, in this case), and attempts to rebuild it as a blockbuster that appeals to both fans and newcomers. Presumably it will go the same route and fail to generate further reductive, CGI-overloaded movies in future years. Good.

The Dark Tower follows tweenage lead Jake (Tom Chambers), a troubled lad whose freaky pencil sketches turn out to be a visions of other worlds – worlds that involve the titular ‘tower’. The tower turns out to be the lynchpin holding the whole universe in order, and it’s under threat from the Man in Black (Matthew McConnaughey), whose plan of destruction requires Jake’s involvement.

Fortunately, Jake finds himself under the protection of The Gunslinger (Idris Elba), a sort of inter-dimensional cowboy. The two fight monsters and pass through portals on a journey to foil the Man’s plan.

Throughout, McConaughey seemingly does an impersonation of someone – Benedict Cumberbatch, perhaps, or Kevin Spacey – doing a Matthew McConaughey impersonation for a late-night chat-show audience. Elba might have taken his role in order to quash all those James Bond rumours. No one is likely to think of him as a properly suave or mysterious gunman for a good while.