‘Dark Tower’ covers web of universes bound by single power

Anyone with at least a passing interest in the long-gestating film adaptation of Stephen King's "Dark Tower" has no doubt read about its tumultuous trail to the screen. The film is nowhere near the disaster many critics may have you believe, but it's also completely disposable and derivative, vanishing into the mind's ether before your movie seat flips back to its upright position.

Based on a beloved, sprawling eight-book series by the famed author, "Tower" covers a web of universes bound together by one single tower. A mephistophelian character named Walter (played by Matthew McConaughey) is determined to destroy it, for reasons never made truly clear. Stopping him is up to a sharp-shooting wanderer named Roland (played by Idris Elba), known as "The Gunslinger," who is impervious to Walter's ability to control minds (again, for reasons never made truly clear).

Meanwhile, on present-day Earth, a young boy named Jake (played by Tom Taylor) is haunted by visions of these dichotomous men (for reasons never made tru...you get the idea), and, after a quick Google search, he finds a conveniently located time portal mere blocks away that jettisons him to Midworld where he teams up with Roland to battle Walter.

Having not read the source material, I can only blame the film's writers for what seems like a lot of cinematic plagiarism. In its relatively short runtime, "Tower" seems to have grafted parts from "Lord of the Rings," "The Matrix," "Terminator 2" and any number of young-adult sci-fi dystopian novels, but without the epic sprawl or budget.

As an admirer of Elba's work, I think he's given far too little to do here, aside from grimace and grunt throughout. But he fares far better than McConaughey, who has recently demonstrated his impeccable strengths as an actor, but who struts and preens through the film like a bizarre love-child of David Bowie and Christopher Walken (and while that may sound damn interesting, I assure you the result is nowhere near the campy goodness one would hope for).

Scenes begin as though they are going to lay out the film's foundation only to abruptly end and flip to a new one. It's like being in a room with an impulsive, impatient TV viewer in control of the remote. Just when you want to watch a little more for context ... click ... you're on another channel for a moment or two until ... click ... back to the previous.

The cinematic well runs deep with painful Stephen King adaptations (last year alone gave us the solidly unwatchable steaming turd known as "The Cell"), and this is far from the bottom. But it also never comes close to scaling to the heights of its universe-building promise. There is talk of a TV series that would follow the film, and, hopefully, that would serve to better furnish this empty "Tower."