Review of The Great Wall (2016) by Kaptenvideo — 21 Mar 2017

Middle Ages or something. European mercenaries (Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal) searching for black powder become embroiled in the defense of the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures. Also starring: Tian Jing, Willem Dafoe. Directed by Yimou Zhang.

China is an attractive movie market for Hollywood and they are also eager to spend money on making international hit movies, so uniting forces to produce some epics is an emerging trend. The American production values plus a leading star or two, combined with Chinese money, actors and locations – what could go wrong?

Well, in the case of „The Great Wall“, almost everything. It’s 103 minutes of almost non-stop action so it may appeal to some, especially it (s)he hasn’t had enough of Tolkien-flavored epics populating the screens for the last 15+ years. But for others, it’s lazily written, acted and put together B-movie which has high aspirations but is too dumb and derivative to achieve that. There’s almost no story, or interesting characters. Even the massive action scenes don’t save much, more often than not the result just looks cheap. Even surprisingly cheap, considering the hefty budget of 135-150 million US dollars. This is the most expensive film ever made with (mostly) Chinese money.

The only impressive thing is how orchestrated the defending side looks, all those color-coded legions, weapons, the whole shebang. It’s probably done with a lot of CGI but still… not bad.

I also think the whole „monsters raiding Chinese Wall“ aspect is woefully underdeveloped and, in a bad way, videogame-ish. They don’t have much personality design-wise and making them so strong raises more important questions than the story bothers to answer. In short, the work here is weak.

Matt Damon has the only noteworthy role in the whole movie, all others are filler. And even he can not make a character so shallow especially convincing. Damon is one of those top class stars who appears in lots of movies but, as a rule, avoids derivative crap. „The Great Wall“ is probably the worst big project he has ever done. The sooner it’s forgotten, the better for everybody.

If you are interested in „The Great Wall“, maybe just watch the trailer and save 100 minutes of your life. The movie sucks. You will feel tired after twenty minutes or so. Watched it in 2D, so maybe 3D version sucks even more.