Review: The Great Wall Could Have Been Greater.
- Feb 16, 2017
- 2 min read
$100,000,000 to make. 1 hour and 43 minutes long. What where they trying to do?
William (Matt Damon) is a mercenary travelling to China in hopes of acquiring the mystical black powder. But before long he and his companion Tovar (Pedro Pascal) become tied up in a war between an elite military force and their savage reptilian foe. Atop The Great Wall the fate of China, and indeed the world, will be decided.
Directed by Yimou Zhang, the visionary behind Hero and House of Flying Daggers, The Great Wall is, hands down, the best looking movie of 2017, so far at least. The man uses colour and scale like no one else and it creates something that is truly marvellous to behold. Unfortunately, outside of the outstanding visuals and a few great action scenes, there isn't a lot great about The Great Wall.
Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal are easily the best actors here and their friendship feels genuine with each playing off the other nicely. It is so good in fact i would have preferred a movie just about them, but I guess we got what we got.
And what did we get? Other than a half-assed plot and what amounts to a cameo by Willem Dafoe, we got World War Z style reptiles laying siege to the so called Nameless Order it what is some of the most spectacular action around.
They pull out all the tricks here. You want arrows, they've got three different kinds. Catapult? How about flaming catapults? Giant blades that scythe along the wall? Check. Gymnasts fighting lizards? You bet. A fight in the fog? Done. Hot air balloons? On there way. Characters I can care about? Who are you, go look for that somewhere else. The Great Wall has two really great action sequences, the first feeling like a climactic battle from a Lord of the Rings film and the second adding tension and imaginative twists. Both of these are easily worth the price of admission, even if it does conclude with a Phantom Menace cop out, and look great on the big screen but regrettably, the rest of the movie surrounds them.
The plot exists to string together the action and the characters, outside of Damon and Pascal, are completely forgettable. There's a weak romance that never goes anywhere between Damon and the commander of the Chinese forces and Damon's awfully un-placable accent doesn't help. As for Dafoe, he might as well have been dropped.
The Great Wall is by no means a masterpiece, and fortunately, it never claims to be. It could have benefitted from being at least an hour longer, possibly even two films, anything to have more time to develop the characters and the situation. But, as it stands, if you like great visuals and solid action and can ignore all the fluff that surrounds it, there are worse ways to spend your time.
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