On Monday's show, presidential secrecy and transparency. That might be scary.īIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine. And even at its worst, it isn't painful to watch unless you're a studio accountant. Yes, it's terrible, but lavishly, generously terrible. If you don't on some level love "The Great Wall" I feel bad for you. The money shot had to be lousy or it wouldn't fit with the rest of the movie. But in a way, I'd have been disappointed if it hadn't. In the climactic shot, two characters swing over hundreds of monsters and it looks incredibly fake.
What happens if the queen trips and falls? The whole species goes extinct? Oh, let's not quibble. Evolutionarily speaking, that strikes me as very maladaptive. This is one of those movies where you stop the monster by killing the queen, who sends out some sort of life force.
Matt Damon drops his voice half an octave and sucks in his gut and tries to look heroically stoic.įor a while, I wondered why he made "The Great Wall," but then I realized - why not? As a big movie star, he can be a secret agent, an astronaut on Mars or a fearless warrior in ancient China. She says a man must learn to trust before he can be trusted. She fights for her people, she says, while he only looks out for himself. A friend I was with said, 60 years? They had 60 years and that's all they could come up with? Send some acrobats down on ropes and watch them get eaten?Ī young female leader named Lin forms a bond with William, but the alliance at first is uneasy. Identically blue-clad female warriors get strapped into harnesses and swing down to lance the creatures, though unfortunately, what comes back up is only chewed-up harnesses. And we follow the balls all the way down as they go boom. And down below, soldiers take big, heavy, iron balls and douse them in oil and light them and send them raining down on the Tao Tei. Atop the wall, the Nameless Order surveys the charging beasts while scores of men beat scores of big drums. The setup for the first battle - that's impressive, though. But the action isn't edited so you can see what's going on, so they go by in a blur. The Tao Tei look like giant reptiles with helmet heads out of an "Alien" movie. I don't think he's ever had to contend with this much CGI clutter, though. Wuxia is the martial arts sword and sorcery genre, and "The Great Wall's" director, Zhang Yimou, made a couple of the greatest wuxia films ever - "Hero" in 2002 and "House Of Flying Daggers" in 2004. I guess they watched a lot of wuxia movies and internalized the bad subtitles. Much of the dialogue sounds like that, like it's badly translated from Mandarin. The Nameless don't believe one man alone could kill a Tao Tei, so Garin recounts the story. When the film begins, Garin kills a Tao Tei and brings its hand to a nearby fortress behind the Great Wall in which the so-called Nameless Order trains for 60 years for the next Tao Tei uprising. Damon's William Garin is in China with his comic relief Spaniard pal Tovar, played by Pedro Pascal. They live in Jade mountain and - I'm reading from my press notes - rise every 60 years to feed upon humanity and punish mankind's greed. Film critic David Edelstein has this review.ĭAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: "The Great Wall" stars Matt Damon as a mercenary in ancient China fighting computer-generated monsters alongside thousands of Chinese extras whose salaries added together probably didn't equal Damon's. A new action movie shot in China by a Chinese director has a budget of $150 million and an American star.
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