Your Guilty Pleasure of the Year Is Here
Director: Yimou Zhang
Starring: Matt Damon, Tian Jing, Pedro Pascale, Hanyu Zhang, Lu Han and Willem Dafoe
Studio: Universal Pictures International
Rated: 14A
Running Time: 1 Hr, 43 Mins
Sometimes you get a movie that isn’t great (or even good) but isn’t necessarily bad either. I tend to refer to movies that fall into that cinematic no man’s land as Guilty Pleasures. This is where flicks like Hansel & Gretel, Victor Frankenstein and The Nice Guys Fall. They aren’t what you would call good movies, but aren’t awful either. They aren’t going to bowl you over or win any wards but they have a redeeming quality or two and in the end you don’t mind forking over the price of admission.
The Great Wall definitely fits that particular bill
Video: Legendary
Medieval European mercenaries William (Mat Damon) and Tovar (Pedro Pascale) have the worst timing. The lone survivors of a band searching for the legendary “black powder,” they arrive at The Middle Kingdom just as China prepares to defend itself against an endless horde of ravenous monsters called Taotie. Making their stand at the Great Wall, the Nameless Order is the army tasked with defending the Chinese Empire every sixty years when the Taotie awaken. Unfortunately for the Order and the two erstwhile mercenaries, the monstrous Taotie have been evolving and are now more than a match for the elite army and the fortified Great Wall that stands between them and the rest of the world.
William, a lifelong survivor with no loyalty to any cause or flag, soon finds himself facing an unenviable decision. Escape with the treasure he crossed the entire known world to find or fight for a lost cause with an army of strangers in a foreign land for something greater than himself.
The first thing that will strike you about The Great Wall is the vibrant, energetic costumes and set pieces. The colour schemes and intricate, painstaking production design are Oscar worthy and pull you deeper into the world the movie portrays. This precious attention to detail combined with the discipline of the massive cast fortifies the movie’s world building efforts and lends an epic air to the film.
The action scenes are highlighted by signature Chinese hyper kinetic and gravity defying originality. It isn’t The Matrix but it will raise your eyebrows on a few occasions. Having said that though, this co-operative effort between North American studios and the Chinese owned Legendary East may have missed an opportunity by not embedding more Eastern intensity into the action.
There are plenty of eye opening practical effects and the movie does a good job of combining impressively choreographed stunt work with some strong CGI. Director Yimou Zhang deserves some kudos for keeping such a sprawling, diverse effort on the movie making tracks. It could not have been easy keeping a cast of such scale who didn’t all speak the same language and on the same page (especially on a production with so many moving parts).
If you are looking for storytelling and characterization, The Great Wall may not be the movie for you. It doesn’t suffer from Michael Bay levels of bad in these respects, but it isn’t Martin Scorsese either. The Great Wall doesn’t skip those elements entirely, but instead it focuses its 103 minutes more on the action. While that may not necessarily be the wrong choice, a few more details on the Nameless Order and the origin of the curse it has faced for two thousand years may have been nice. While the movie doesn’t ignore the motivations of the leads entirely, it’s pretty skimpy on the backstories. It may have been able to stretch its legs a little more as an eight or ten episode TV series (though the scale would have likely suffered).
Damon is sufficient as the mercenary and expert bowman William. He portrays the moral dilemma William wrestles with well enough but don’t expect The Great Wall to make his career highlight package. Pedro Pascale steals a scene or two as William’s sidekick Tovar, providing the movie’s few laughs. Pascale and Damon’s on-screen chemistry sums up the entire movie, decent but not spectacular (they feel like a couple of kids who just met at summer camp).
Hanyu Zhang adds genuine gravitas as General Shao, a battle hardened yet wise warlord who doesn’t allow his sense of duty to blind his judgment. The Great Wall did miss an opportunity with Tian Jing’s Commander Lin Mae though. Jing brings plenty of authoritative grace to the role, but too often the movie pushes her aside to shine the spotlight on Damon. If it had put the two on equal footing, not only would it have made Lin Mae’s considerable political authority more convincing, it would have helped ease fears of cultural white washing as well.
(On a side note, while those fears are valid in today’s charged political environment, they should not apply to The Great Wall. The story explaining how two white Europeans wind up in medieval China is plausible, most of the acts of valour and self sacrifice are performed by Chinese characters and the white guys account for just about all the movie’s duplicity and deception. Still, giving Jing the same footing as Damon would have been a step in a better direction).
The Great Wall is definitely worth checking out, especially for action and fantasy fans. It will provide a nice taste of Chinese cinema for anyone who hasn’t experienced it yet (and given China’s emergence as a box office super power, we could see many more partnerships like this in the near future) and the scale of costumes set pieces will impress amateur history buffs. Don’t feel guilty about enjoying it, rather consider it a nice appetizer for the rest of the year; it may not satisfy your appetite entirely, but it should tide you over until the movie smorgasbord coming in March.
Image Universal Pictures
