‘Tower’ stands tall in line-up of Stephen King-inspired movies

“The Dark Tower,” Stephen King’s sprawling, eight-novel magnum opus, has been distilled to a compact, 93-minute movie that’s an amalgam of horror, fantasy and Western-movie elements, and is propelled by three powerful performances.

It’s a tale of wounded virtue in the persona of a mythical six-gun-toting character called the Gunslinger (a brooding Idris Elba) battling a satanic black-hearted blackguard known as the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey, mixing remorselessness and an odd sense of geniality in his performance).

Caught in the middle of the epic struggle between the two is a 14-year-old kid named Jake (Tom Taylor).

Jake, gifted with psychic powers, is the haunted centerpiece of “Tower,” papering his room with nightmare-inspired sketches of the Gunslinger and the Man in Black and the alternate universe where their warfare plays out.

With deep-set, red-rimmed eyes, Taylor, a relative newcomer to features, provides an unsettling foretaste early on of the sense of deep disquiet that pervades the movie.

The tower of the title is a magical structure that is the linchpin of the multiple worlds in which the story is set.

McConaugheys’ Man in Black aims to topple it and cast those worlds into chaos. Elba’s Gunslinger is the last surviving member of a league of warriors dedicated to protecting the tower.

The titular structure bears a not-accidental resemblance to Barad-dûr, the tower of Sauron from “The Lord of the Rings,” and the Gunslinger is a man in the mold of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. King has readily acknowledged those influences on his novels.

In the vast canon of King-derived movies, “Tower” belongs in the upper ranks.

This story was originally published August 3, 2017 at 12:31 PM with the headline "‘Tower’ stands tall in line-up of Stephen King-inspired movies."