There have been a number of great movies based on Stephen King novels, like “The Shining,” “Stand by Me,” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” I’m told “The Dark Tower” movie adaptation is a splice of the book series. I never read the series, but looking at the movie,

The movie is about a mid world where a long tower protects the Earth from total darkness. Only the mind of a child triggered by science can destroy it, and if it’s destroyed, all Hell breaks loose on Earth. That is the Man in Black’s (Matthew McConaughey) goal.

The only one immune to his powers is Roland (Idris Elba), the last Gunslinger, whose mission is to stop him, especially since he murdered his father (Dennis Haysbert).

All this are visions placed inside a New York kid named Jake (Tom Taylor), whose mother (Katheryn Winnick) and stepfather (Nicholas Pauling) both think he’s crazy and want to send him to a clinic. Apparently, the representatives of this clinic are actually demons (the Man in Black’s goons) in disguise. Jake escapes and finds an abandoned Brooklyn house, which has a portal to the mid world. That’s where he meets Roland.

Elba as wonderful in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” “Beasts of No Nation,” “Pacific Rim,” “Zootopia,” and “The Jungle Book.” And McConaughey has played a number of great characters in “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Interstellar,” “Mud,” “Tropic Thunder,” “Dazed and Confused,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Paperboy,” and “Magic Mike.” I met these two, respectively before this movie was conceived, but “The Dark Tower” isn’t one of their better ones. And Taylor could have a future, but he’s done nothing special here.

The movie starts off promising, but once the kid makes it to the mid world, it’s either boring, baffled, or poorly acted. In fact, I stopped caring about whether the tower would fall or not. The drama is sappy, the jokes aren’t funny, the effects are lame, and most of the way through, I was writing this review on my iPhone. You want to see a great movie with guns, then go see “Baby Driver,” “Dunkirk,” or “Detroit.” They’re among the year’s very best; “The Dark Tower” is among the year’s very worst.

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Categories: Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci Fi