Rating: 4/5
The Great Wall is a Chinese-US co-production, marketed heavily to Western audiences as an intense, gritty action film. About ten minutes into the film it becomes pretty clear that this is a bold-faced lie. Set during the gunpowder-fueled Song Dynasty, Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal star as greedy foreigners searching for a great weapon in China, when they meet a young military commander played by Chinese actress Jing Tian. She warns them of a violent horde of dog-like monsters called ‘Tao Tie’, which routinely assault the Great Wall as punishment for a past Emperor’s greed, or something. Willem Dafoe is also here and he nervously looks around some corners a bunch.
Then everything goes insane, and it becomes very clear that this is not a Western-directed film, given the very un-American structure and dialogue. Early in the film the monster-horde attacks China’s Great Wall for the first time; groups of women leap off the wall and skewer the monsters dragoon-style while war drums pound, troops in Power Ranger-coloured armour hack and slash for their life and our confused white boys do their darndest to impress the untrusting military, the ironically named Nameless Order.
The Great Wall is terrible in a lot of ways, like the dialogue, which feels like it’s from a poorly translated Eastern video game. It’s predictable, and in the end it’s just dumb fun. However, that fun has an abundance of heart - full of overblown ridiculous action and colourful costumes. Not to give anything away, The Great Wall offers a surprisingly touching third act, deftly sidestepping ‘white hero’ and romantic interest clichés. There’s no true subversion of these tropes, no life-changing epiphanies to be had, but it’s very charming if you have a taste for cheesy action and unintentionally hysterical characters. If we’re lucky, this is only the first in a wealth of joint efforts between Eastern and Western blockbuster film creators.