The Great Wall Reviewed

Hitting A Wall

♦Tripwire’s Editor-in-Chief JOEL MEADOWS grabbed his bow and his horse and cast his eye over The Great Wall, the lavish Matt Damon Chinese fantasy epic…

The Great Wall
Director: Yimou Zhang
Stars: Matt Damon, Tian Jing, Willem Defoe

The Great Wall is apparently the most expensive Chinese film ever made with a shooting budget clocking in at around $150m. The Chinese market for films has become more and more a key factor in the box office takings of each season’s giant Hollywood confections. So it was only a matter of time before the Chinese tried to beat the Americans at their own game. The Great Wall is about mercenary William (Damon) and his colleague Tovar (Pedro Pascal), who find themselves imprisoned in the Great Wall of China and are forced through some sort of misguided honour to help the Chinese battle the monsters who are trying to break through into our dimension and wreak havoc on our world.

Now Yimou Zhang is one of the most experienced modern Chinese directors, with Hero and House of Flying Daggers on his CV so you know that visually The Great Wall is going to be impressive. The problem here is that while it does possess a number of amazing looking set pieces and the monsters the Chinese battle are well-executed (you would expect nothing less from Weta), the script is hackneyed and terrible. Damon’s accent veers from American to English, then some sort of indeterminate European accent. There isn’t enough action to satisfy the big budget movie junkie and the other characters are so paper thin that they don’t hold the viewers’ attention at all. Historical accuracy is thrown out of the window which wouldn’t matter if the rest was sufficiently entertaining. Even the presence of Willem Defoe as fellow westerner Ballard in the cast isn’t enough to rescue it.

As an adventure film in the mold of Indiana Jones or The Mummy, The Great Wall is naive, childish and intermittently engaging. It fees like a huge budget cinematic afterthought with little care or attention taken with most of its facets. It isn’t totally devoid of charm but it feels very flimsy indeed a lot of the time. Eight year children will get a kick out of it but in a world where we are already overflowing with decently made adventure films like the Star Wars franchise or most of the Marvel fare, The Great Wall will just disappear at the international box office. It will no doubt clean up in China though.

JOEL MEADOWS

The Great Wall is out now in the UK cinemas.

The Great Wall review www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk