The Great Wall ** (2016, Matt Damon, Tian Jing, Willem Dafoe, Pedro Pascal, Andy Lau) – Movie Review

Zhang Yimou is one of the world’s great film directors but unfortunately this simple-minded 2016 fantasy action adventure is not a great film. Despite the title, it’s not really about The Great Wall at all. It’s a monster movie!

It starts with a brief history and explanation of The Great Wall, and says there are real and fabled stories about it. Supposedly it took 1700 years to build and is 5500 miles long and, do you know what, it was built to keep monsters out. This is obviously a fabled version of the story because zillions of CGI monsters are attacking The Great Wall and, duh, there are actually no real monsters!

Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal play a couple of European mercenaries, William and Tovar, who are searching for ‘the black powder’ and hove up at The Great Wall, where they are unwelcome, arrested, considered for death, but spared. There they meet Commander Lin Mae (Tian Jing), an exceptionally feisty feminist battle warrior, who suggests she has taken a shine to William, and Ballard (Willem Dafoe), who’s been there awhile, but is also after  ‘the black powder’.

Exactly who William and Tovar are, we do not know, as we are plunged immediately into the action (apart from a brief scene that explains lamely the all-important plot point of why William has a magnet in his possession – along the lines of ‘I’ll keep it if you’re throwing it away, it might be useful to make a compass’.)

I’m guessing The Great Wall was once a true epic about twice as long as its current measly running time of 103 minutes. It plays like a condensed cut-down of a TV mini-series, with most of the dialogue and character scenes missing.

Anyway, soon enough, the marauding beasts besiege the massive structure of The Great Wall, and while Tovar and Ballard make off with much of ‘the black powder’, William risks his life for the honour of helping the Chinese elite warriors to confront the unimaginable, unstoppable force of the monsters, the Taotie.

Luckily, not only does William have immense battle skills on his side, he has the magnetic stone, which turns out at close range can pacify the Taotie, who simply go to sleep under the magnet’s spell. Unhistorically, at the very vague historical time point of the movie (maybe between AD 960 and AD 1127), the Chinese aren’t supposed to have magnets, though Chinese civilisation actually made compasses from magnetic stones in the Han dynasty (AD 100) and really China mus have been full of magnetic stones.

Plus, it is infuriating that the monsters can be so easily subdued with just a random handy Mcguffin thingy. And, finally, it’s doubly infuriating that the monsters can be so easily vanquished, when it is discovered that all William and Commander Lin Mae have to do is to trust each other, swing from a rope together and kill the Taotie queen. How do they know the zillions of CGI monsters will all vanish off the computer when the Taotie queen is dead? Oh, they somehow just know.

Have I mentioned that with  $150,000,000 spent on it, the movie looks like an animated feature almost all the time, with just a few scenes shot in real sets? The CGI runs riot, with way, way, way too many monsters. It may be only a fable playing fast and loose with history but it needs to establish its own alternate reality, and credibility. And it doesn’t.

Sad to say Damon, a modern actor if ever there is one, looks ill at ease, especially in his period wigs and costumes, and, in ridiculously large close-ups, a bit tired and unfit. Pascal is no good at all, and the two actors establish no rapport, which is going to be essential for the story’s extraordinary resolution. A scarily thin-looking Dafoe is not at his best either.

Tian Jing, Andy Lau and the rest of the Chinese actors are strong, though in subsidiary roles. Most of their dialogue is sub-titled, though there’s a language problem with the English-speaking Lin Mae having to translate everything back and forward between the Europeans and the Chinese, the film repeating itself laboriously.

However, the 103 minutes pass quickly and painlessly in a spectacular CGI visual feast, with virtually non-stop sequences of fantasy action violence. It is never very good but at least it is never boring.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com