THE GREAT WALL REVIEW

THE GREAT WALL is what would happen if you took the script for a SyFy Channel movie, gave it a decent budget, a big star cast, and made it with a little more care on a longer schedule. Which is not a bad thing for genre fans, but it is if you are a major studio who was hoping you were making a holiday or summer tent-pole pic, which feels like the case.

Written by Carlo Bernard (NARCOS), Doug Miro (NARCOS) and Tony Gilroy (BOURNE IDENTITY, MICHAEL CLAYTON), and Directed by Yimou Zhang (HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS), pic opens with William (Matt Damon) and Tovar (GAME OF THRONES’ Pedro Pascal) on the run from marauders in a rugged Chinese landscape. The duo are mercenaries seeking exploding “black powder” to take back to Europe to increase their military strength.

After escaping the band of thieves, William and Tavor are attacked in the night by an unseen creature. William skillfully dispatches of it, and keeps a severed limb with the hope someone they come across can tell them just exactly what it was. The next morning, they find themselves on the run from the marauders again, and end-up running into The Great Wall of China. When the marauders see the wall is manned by an enormous army, the take off, leaving William and Tavor to be taken prisoner. Their captors discover the creature’s limb in their possession, and it is at this point they reveal the wall was built to fend off vicious creatures called the Tao Tei which attack every sixty years, and it just so happens to be time for their assault. William and Tavor are in awe of the innovative, and well organized army, which is co-led by Lin Mae (Tian Jing) who

commands a squad of women just as lethal as the men. She also becomes the quiet love interest for William, which is no surprise because the story is predictable from the onset. The linear narrative putting William and Tavor through the all too familiar paces of wanting to leave this madness and just get home as wave after wave of creatures attack the wall, until William is drawn by both his heart and sense of duty to remain and fight, against Tavor’s wishes.

While you’re never looking to these kinds of films to be big on character development, you do want enough meat to care about the people involved. Sadly, the backstories feel obligatory here, like filler while you’re waiting for the next action sequence, and as a result you feel nothing when characters become monster fodder.

One area where the script actually does deter from the template (and it feels like the work of Tony Gilroy) is at the moments when it feels like William is the white man who has come to rescue the natives, the script pulls back and reminds us this civilization was one of the most advanced for its time, and while William does offer some solutions to help their cause, they are not lost without him, and he just happens to have the right idea at the right time, rather than rescuing them from their ignorance.

On the positive side, the sets and costumes are top notch, the colors pop off the screen, and Yimou Zhang can be credited with getting the most out of a weak script, and there are some cool and inventive reveals involving the military weaponry; most of them so over the top they elicit a laugh, but in a fun way.

But, from the opening title sequence to the closing one, you get the sense this film was supposed to feel, and be, bigger. It just never gets there. All of the plot points feel like connecting dots to get us to the finale, rather than spinning the story in an unexpected direction. They are also underplayed both visually and pace wise, never really feeling like the big shifts of a tent pole summer flick. Which is why it was dumped in February.

All that being said, this movie is just plain dumb fun. If you liked PACIFIC RIM (which suffered from some of the same shortcomings) you should like THE GREAT WALL. It has monsters. It has monster goo. And it has strong, attractive women in armor who kick ass. My eleven-year-old daughter loved it. So, if you can tap into the sense of wonder of an eleven-year-old, you’ll have a good time. If not, best wait for Red Box, order some pizza, grab a six pack, and settle in for an “elevated” SyFy flick.

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