Plot points for The Dark Tower, a film you should not see, and the Dark Tower books, which you should read, are discussed below.
Here's what I don't quite understand about The Dark Tower: If you're going to adapt Stephen King's eight-book opus into a feature film—with the hopes of turning it into a whole series of films with accompanying TV shows—why would you turn its lead character, Roland Deschain, aka the Gunslinger (Idris Elba), into a supporting character?
Make no mistake: The Dark Tower is very much the tale of Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), a kid from New York City being driven insane by nightmares of the world's end and his own father's demise. It's about figuring out what's wrong with Jake, about figuring out why Jake's special, about figuring out what draws The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) to Jake, about figuring out why inhuman monsters wearing human masks want to capture Jake, about figuring out why The Gunslinger would help Jake, about Jake helping Roland navigate our world, about Jake's efforts to stop the destruction of the Dark Tower—the nexus of all universes.
Roland has no scenes without Jake. They are rarely separated in shots by more than a few minutes. Roland lives only to serve Jake's narrative progress.
And look, maybe there's a great movie—a whole series of great movies—to be made about Jake's adventures in Midworld, a YA quest that draws heavily from the source material (his dog-like companion, Oy, would sell tons of plushies, I'm sure) in order to please fans of the books while simultaneously drawing in new audiences. But The Dark Tower, which feels both bloated with plot points and also underbaked with its 90-or-so-minute running time, isn't a particularly promising start to this would-be franchise.
Leave aside the changes made to the source material, such as the introduction of technology used to transport people between Roland's Earth, Midworld, and Jake's/ours, the so-called Keystone Earth; those're irrelevant, all adaptations make such alterations. Instead focus on the fact that there isn't a single interesting shot in the whole movie—most of the action sequences are murkily lit, as if the producers were trying to hide some shoddy CGI work. Perhaps more frustratingly, there isn't a single interestingly choreographed shootout, a shame given Roland's status as a legendary gunfighter whose six-shooters were made from Excalibur's steel. Ape The Matrix or John Wick or literally anything other than quick-cut bang-bang-body-fall-down garbage that masquerades for action in this film.
You can, sadly, see a coterie of talented actors struggling with material they know to be beneath them. Elba channels the spirit of Deschain as well as anyone could, given the script he's forced to work with, while McConaughey revels in playing the bad guy (though it seemed to my untrained eye that he's saddled with two different wigs throughout; one wonders which was the Emergency Reshoot Hairpiece and which was used during the primary filming). The youngster Taylor, meanwhile, is quite good as the haunted Jake—better than he has any right to be, honestly. One hopes he finds better projects going forward.
There really is an abundance of talent here, a wealth of riches that is remarkably poorly utilized. Dennis Haysbert plays Roland's father and gets exactly one scene. Jackie Earle Haley plays, I dunno, "Head Rat Man" in Keystone New York. Meanwhile, Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road; The Neon Demon) is expertly cast as a bird-creature hiding as a human—her oversized eyes and spindly limbs give her a slightly alien quality that matches the role perfectly. It's too bad she's given nothing at all to do.
There are grating references to other King works through the film; Jake, for example, is said to have "the shine," an obvious reference to The Shining. We see the number 1408 appear onscreen and a sign advertising a Barlow and Straker's. If you understand these terms you'll be amused; if not, they'll wash over you. As someone who did get the references, all I can say is that I wish they'd spent more time on the film's script and the whole project's conception than they seem to have on the cussing Easter Eggs.
As a fan of the books and a fan of the actors and a fan of, I dunno, films, I guess, the whole experience was rather dispiriting. Thankfully, it's not very long. At 95 minutes or so it's the shortest tentpole misfire you'll see this year; as such, it moves along at a brisk pace that doesn't allow for much reflection over just how empty the whole thing is.