You know how some movies are so bad they're good? The Great Wall is so bad it's bad. The Great Wall is mindless fun, minus the fun. This isn't a disaster movie, but it is a disaster of a movie. The duo who wrote Disney's Prince of Persia and The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and The Last Samurai's Edward Zwick. And a number of monsters are killed in all sorts of ways without ever putting the PG-13 rating in doubt.Ī $150 million American-Chinese co-production, The Great Wall is directed by Zhang Yimou ( Hero, House of Flying Daggers) but written by a sextet of Americans including Bourne scribe Tony Gilroy, World War Z author Max Brooks, Willem Dafoe features as a Westerner who came looking for black powder twenty-five years ago and has been here ever since. There is an almost romance between William and an attractive Chinese commander (Jing Tian). And naturally, the monsters have a queen. Magnets evidently disrupt the electromagnetic frequency by which the hordes of monsters communicate. William comes up with the idea to capture a monster alive by hooking it like a whale. William and Tovar are prisoners some of the time. That happens two or three times and that's the whole movie. Monsters attack, William is a white knight. Now, they also have William with his confidence and archery skills. The Chinese have measures in place to try to defend their Great Wall from these nimble threats.
China, you see, is under siege by these legendary monsters that emerge every 60 years to do damage. The men are taken in by Chinese officials, who initially doubt their story but come to believe them and welcome their input. Instead, the two mercenaries find a giant reptilian beast, whom William slays with one swift blow of his sword and takes the slain's arm as a trophy he hopes someone can identify. That's right, stop the presses: a period monster movie opening in February is terrible.ĭamon plays William, a Westerner with an unplaceable accent who is in 11th Century China with his pal Tovar (Pedro Pascal) looking for the fabled black powder of immense weaponizable power. But now, Damon has broken tradition and made The Great Wall, a movie as spectacularly bad as you fear it might be. The Martian, an acclaimed blockbuster nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, and five other Oscars and The Brothers Grimm, a fairly indefensible Terry Gilliam fantasy. The worst I would accuse Damon of giving us are Ocean's Twelve, a disappointing sequel sandwiched between a great and a good heist comedy While his friend and screenwriting partner Ben Affleck has had his ups and downs, Matt Damon has impressively managed to avoid making bad movies in the twenty years since they both became stars via their Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting.