The Dark Tower

Jake Chambers ( Tom Taylor ) is a normal boy who lives in New York with his mother, Laurie ( Katheryn Winnick ). At least he was normal once. But since his father died during an operation, nothing works for him anymore. He’s aggressive, always in trouble at school. And then there are his strange nightmares about a strange world. What he doesn’t know: This world actually exists. There, the sinister man in black ( Matthew McConaughey ) tries to destroy a tower in order to become ruler of all worlds. But for that he needs children with a special talent. kids like Jake. And only gunslinger Roland Deschain ( Idris Elba), who has been fighting the sorcerer for many years, can still stop the apocalypse.

When asked which film will be the worst flop of the year, two big names were thrown into the room: Valerian – The City of a Thousand Planets and The Dark Tower. The latter should certainly get off lightly in the end. On the one hand, the template is better known: Stephen King ‘s series of novels of the same name is even more common worldwide than the obscure French comic series from the 1960s. Then there’s Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, who bring more star power. Above all, the budget is said to have been significantly cheaper at $ 60 million. The studio is happy about that, but the audience isn’t. Because the book adaptation is cheap in a way that it shouldn’t and shouldn’t have been.

The big catastrophe may not have become “The Dark Tower“, but it is a meaningless, unnecessarily rushed fantasy adventure without real fantasy. The characters are nothing more than clichés, the plot is thin, the locations are boring, many aspects remain without background and explanation, not even the fights are really convincing. That’s also disappointing because there are hints from time to time that the adaptation of Stephen King’s novel series would have had a lot more to tell.

• The Dark Tower