Snarling digital monsters, a glowering Matt Damon and battalions of unfaltering Chinese warriors mix it up in “The Great Wall,” a painless, overstuffed spectacle that works overtime as a testament to China’s might. Set once upon a time, the movie spins a legend that never was: Every 60 years, slavering creatures emerge from beyond to sharpen their teeth on human bones and stuff their bellies on meat. The whole thing plays out as if it had been thought up by someone who, while watching “Game of Thrones” and smoking a bowl, started riffing on walls, China and production money.
The threadbare story turns on a swaggering mercenary, William (Mr. Damon), who’s trying to find what he calls “black powder,” a.k.a. gunpowder. He and a sidekick, Tovar (Pedro Pascal, from “Game of Thrones”), end up at the Great Wall, where after some macho posturing and chest thumping, they join forces with the wall’s guardians, including an English-speaking military genius, Lin Mae (Jing Tian); an adviser, Wang (Andy Lau); and an ᴀssortment of supporting glowerers (Hanyu Zhang, Eddie Peng Yu-Yen and Ling Gengxin). Willem Dafoe, the whites of his eyes shining, is there, too, slinking around as Ballard, a Western prisoner who long ago also sought the black powder.
Movie Review: ‘The Great Wall’
The Times critic Manohla Dargis reviews “The Great Wall.”
In “The Great Wall” a mercenary played by Matt Damon helps defend The Great Wall of China against a horde of monsters. In his review Manohla Dargis writes: Snarling digital monsters, a glowering Matt Damon and battalions of unfaltering Chinese warriors mix it up in a not-terrible, predictably overstuffed spectacle that works overtime to be a testament to China’s might. Mr. Damon may be the headliner, but he’s also just one of this movie’s many, many whirring parts.The whole thing plays out as if it had been thought up someone who, while watching “Game of Thrones” and smoking a bowl, started riffing on walls, China and production money.
That’s about it, plus striking locations (the Rainbow Mountains), digital wizardry and battles between hordes of critters (called Tao Tei) and legions of soldiers. These are distinguished by skill and hue, like the blue-clad Crane Corp, who bungee-jump off the wall with spears. Outside of the bromantic quipping between William and Tovar, the dialogue is aggressively simple (no frills, no poetry) and skews along the lines of “Release the Kraken” or, in this case, bring out the flaming balls of death and so forth. This seems to suit the director, Zhang Yimou (“Hero”), who lavishes much of his attention on the wall, which amusingly suggests a giant Swiss Army knife, scissors included.
