- Title: The Dark Tower
- IMDb: link
Throwback Tuesday takes us back to an ill-fated Stephen King adaptation. What had been meant to be the launch of a new movie franchise, the 2017 adaptation of King’s eight-novel series made back its money at the box office but failed to impress either critics or fans. Cannibalizing material from the first few books, and presenting the story as kid-centric gives it a half-assed Percy Jackson or NeverEnding Story structure without fully exploring the worlds or concepts it throws troubled youth Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) into.
Haunted by dreams of an alien world and a tower under attack, Jake is misunderstood by his mother (Katheryn Winnick) and others eventually finding out his visions are true leading him through a portal to the last of the Gunslingers (Idris Elba) who were tasked to protect a tower from falling which, for some reason, would threaten all of reality across different worlds.
And so Roland (Elba) teams up the kid, although he’s more interested in killing the film’s villain (Matthew McConaughey) than saving the universe in a journey that jumps between fallen dystopian worlds (which apparently the tower didn’t protect?) and Earth.
The film doesn’t have much to hang its hat on other than its action sequences. However, these are quite good including the Gunslinger killing an entire army on his own. Sadly, everything else falls short of expectations. The unexplored concepts come off as goofy, the revenge plots distract rather than add to the quest to save the tower, and the film ends just when things were finally getting interesting.
Watch the trailer
