THURSDAY REVIEW OF STEPHEN KING'S THE DARK TOWER

Year Released: 2017

Stephen King is both a popular, highly successful, bestselling author, and at the same time has a cult following: The latter derives from books like THE DARK TOWER... 

King's a rabid fan of fantasy, ranging from Narnia to the original pulpy Conan tales by Robert E. Howard, and this is his own fantastical world located in shrouded mystery far beyond ours, but not really: both locations take place on Earth, and the TOWER is what's holding our dimension together. And so, having not read the source, this review will be as short as possible, befitting what's the best thing about this adaptation...

Score: *1/2

At a sparse 90-minute runtime, director Nikolaj Arcel packs in all the action-packed elements that seem more cliché than anything else. There's a master hero, who's called The Gunslinger; a young boy sent into this man's world to learn the ropes for to protect THE DARK TOWER; and last but not least, The Dark Man i.e. The Man in Black himself, mundanely named Walter...

And while Matthew McConaughey usually brings something spontaneous and interesting to any role, here he simply struts around, a cocky, sinister hybrid of an unsuited Darth Vader and King's THE STAND TV-Miniseries' devil, Randall Flagg — an evil incarnate who looks like he'd shoot pool at the local tavern.

The scenes that should have worked fall completely flat. Like Idris Elba's Gunslinger, Roland, venturing (more like sleepwalking) with the dull kid-actor from the purgatory realm into the bustling modern New York City. Neither our or their hemisphere provides more than a few shoot-outs and a ton of cornball dialogue. Meanwhile, several wizardly types remind the boy he's got a second-sight called... THE SHINING. Well if King detested Stanley Kubrick's classic 1980 adaptation, he should hate this dreary stroll in the dark. Probably not, though. After all, an anemic, lackluster film like this makes reading the book a must.