The Dark Tower is a series of eight books by Stephen King unfolding what I suppose you’d call a mythos, via a salad of genres including science fiction, cosmic fantasy and the western. King fans were troubled to learn that the film adaptation would only be 95 minutes long; for most of us, that’ll be more than plenty. Apparently conceived as a sequel to the books, this feels like an attempt to take Tolkien, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Shane and a rapidly axed TV mini-series or two and cram them all into a half-pint jug.
Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) presides over a sketchy mishmash of portals-and-immortals cosmology involving our old friend the Strangely Gifted Child With Visions (Tom Taylor), an interdimensional cowboy known as the Gunslinger (Idris Elba, muttering away in rueful basso) and a fiendish sorcerer (Matthew McConaughey, entertainingly serpentine in Christopher Walken’s hair).
