And what, you may ask, is Mr. Damon doing here? Mainly providing a star presence for an expensive movie that was produced, with extensive English dialogue, for the international market. He also seems to be channeling his inner Charlton Heston—his character, known only as William, is stolid as a fence post, except for occasional moments of fugitive charm. But William, who came to China in search of gunpowder, is a formidable archer and a good soul who can’t resist helping the soldiers who captured him, especially since their anti-monster campaign is being led by the lissome Commander Lin (Jing Tian), a young woman warrior of unlimited courage, if limited interest in a hot love affair. (The culminating mood is one of human commonality and international solidarity.)
The director was Zhang Yimou. He’s a seminal figure in Chinese film, the man who directed such small-scale masterpieces as “Red Sorghum” and “Raise the Red Lantern,” then made a different sort of name for himself with lavish spectaculars like “House of Flying Daggers” (martial arts as MGM might have staged them) and the opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. There’s no lack of spectacular sequences or fancy weaponry in “The Great Wall,” the most expensive movie ever produced in China: syncopated drums, incendiary arrows, giant harpoons, explosive grenades, aerial balloons that predate the Montgolfier brothers by several centuries, and an elite battalion of female fighters in gorgeous blue uniforms who swoop down on the monsters like aerialists in a circus designed by Busby Berkeley. Yet there’s not a lot of levity, let alone exuberance. Even the 3-D effects are flat, though I did enjoy dodging one wayward discus.
Source: Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern