And when things threaten to get too tranquil, firebombs detonate amidst clusters of Tao Tei, the carnage both gnarly and beautiful.
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Elsewhere, lanterns silently float through the air toward the heavens. One battle scene is draped in thick fog, William having to feel his way through the muck to determine how close the Tao Tei are to him so he doesn’t get devoured. Zhang conceives his action sequences with a grandeur that often makes the human characters secondary to the lavish design. In between, he also designed China’s opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Summer Olympics, and The Great Wall feels like he’s still trying to wow viewers with metric tons of elaborate, exhausting pageantry. The Great Wall has a clever historical anachronism as its hook: What if a bunch of soldiers with only swords and arrows had to square off with scary, rampaging monsters? His career has since traveled down several unlikely, sometimes unsuccessful roads, from classy martial-arts fare ( Hero, House of Flying Daggers) to misbegotten Coen brothers remakes (his Blood Simple homage A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop). The Great Wall has a clever historical anachronism as its hook: What if a bunch of soldiers with only swords and arrows had to square off with scary, rampaging monsters? Combining horror, action, and period spectacle, the movie is directed by Zhang Yimou, who started out as one of China’s most respected art-house filmmakers thanks to Raise the Red Lantern and To Live. Only the Great Wall-and William and his cohorts-can save China from these fearsome critters. The threat comes in the form of a vicious horde of sizable lizard-like monsters known as the Tao Tei, which are trying to ransack the country. Looking for money and sanctuary, they find themselves in China, where they appeal to the Nameless Order, a group of local warriors led by Lin Mae (Jing Tian) and Wang (Andy Lau) who are nervously guarding the country’s Great Wall. And in an era in which Hollywood-China co-productions are going to become a more common occurrence, what’s so dispiriting about The Great Wall is that this dull oddity may just be a sign of things to come.ĭamon plays William, a 12th-century Irish soldier who’s traveled the globe with his faithful companion Tovar (Pedro Pascal) in search of the next army willing to pay them to help fight its wars.
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Is that why he seems so ridiculous in The Great Wall? In grasping the weirdness of this movie, it’s as good a place to start as any, but to be fair to Damon, there is much that’s off about this nutty period-piece monster movie. Since then, he’s done Bourne sequels as well as Green Zone and Elysium, and yet he still carried that whiff of an Average Joe to these roles, dropping the customary swagger and excessive testosterone. (The joke of his character in 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven was that he wasn’t nearly as cool as the rest of the smooth crew, especially George Clooney and Brad Pitt.) But 2002’s The Bourne Identity changed that impression, altering his persona from that of the milquetoast everyman to a lean, brutal assassin. When his career began, starring in and writing the screenplay for 1997’s Good Will Hunting, he seemed too ordinary, too sweet, to ever be part of that ultra-macho genre.
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All these years later, it still is weird to think of Matt Damon as an action hero.