Stephen King's Dark Tower novels may have their flaws but they are nonetheless a highly creative juggernaut that deserved either a fully committed TV adaptation or to be simply left alone.

I'm not sure what was going through the heads of the people involved with this limp mess of a movie. it manages to achieve the double whammy of being completely incomprehensible to non-book readers whilst also being highly insulting to fans of the novels.

As for Matthew McConaughey, I've never been much of a fan and this tragic performance confirms my suspicions that he is one of the most one-dimensional and overrated actors in the business. Idris Elba manages to salvage some artistic integrity from the ruins with a reasonable performance but there is not much one can do with such a godforsaken script.

I love the Dark Tower novels and would recommend them to anybody. It would be difficult for even the best in the business to adequately bring the story to life through cinema but these clowns didn't even try. One of the laziest and Hollywood productions of all-time.

As far as I am concerned, there is no Dark Tower movie yet.

Jake Chambers is a troubled boy in NYC. He's haunted by nightmares and the city is rocked by earthquakes. His visions are of the fearsome Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) and the mysterious last Gunslinger (Idris Elba). After a fight at school, his mother reluctantly calls a facility to the delight of his stepfather. He recognizes the two facility workers as fake-skins from his drawings. He runaways and gets transported through an abandoned portal to Mid-World. A tower at the center of the universe protects every world from the dark forces outside. The Man in Black called Walter with his fake-skin minions intends to use kidnapped children to bring down the tower.

It's been decades since I read the books and I'm not sure if I read them all. The most memorable aspect of the books are the Lobstrosities and I doubt those creatures in the amusement park are them. It's all fine. I don't need them. I do need charismatic characters in a compelling story. The story is relatively bland after getting stripped down from the novels. The characters are even more bland. Both McConaughey and Elba are playing it reserved. It's not wrong but the movie struggles with their blandness. The kid isn't much better although he starts off well. The first act on earth is fine but it doesn't explain the abandoned house. It's just there with the portal and things happen. More things happen and then even more things happen until I stop caring. The sad part is that I don't think anybody on the film set cared either.