The Dark Tower

Drawing on the 4,720-page magnum opus by Stephen King, the film centres on a young boy Jack Chambers (Tom Taylor). He has dreams of a Dark Tower and a battle that has raged for centuries between good and evil, between the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) and the Gunslinger (Idris Elba). His mother thinks he’s struggling with the grief of losing his father, but in fact he has a powerful gift - the ability to see things others can’t. The Dark Tower is real: an age-old structure that keeps realities from collapsing into each other. If the tower falls, worlds collide and Hell will be unleashed…

Though there is a rich source of material to draw on, some that have read the books might be disappointed that so little could be squashed into 95 minutes, and the plot does deviate in order to do so. Those who haven’t read the books, however, will enjoy the phenomenal action, impossible gun skills of the Gunslinger and Wild West aesthetic. Idris Elba makes the most out of a quite laconic character, and there’s some good fish-out-of-water humour when he arrives in our world.