Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal are hilarious together. Here we have a symphony of destruction and violence that's much cooler than the usual CGI nonsense. I can't help but think that The Great Wall with a traditional Hollywood director would have been clunky and overblown. The siege of the wall is an orchestra of carnage. Anyone who's seen Zhang's previous work, like Hero and The House of Flying Daggers, knows this director's vision. The action scenes in this film are brilliantly staged. William and Toval find themselves on the front line against a seemingly unstoppable enemy. It's the barrier protecting humanity from a terrifying onslaught. Hideous monsters, Tao Tei, are being held at bay by the wall.
Even more intriguing is the reason why it's there. What they find is the Great Wall of China. It is their key to a life of luxury in the west. He and his Spanish partner, Toval (Pedro Pascal), have been searching for the legendary black powder that explodes.
THE GREAT WALL MOVIE RATING CRACK
Matt Damon stars as William, a mercenary and crack archer in Crusade era China. Zhang has made a highly cinematic popcorn flick. It's action packed, beautifully shot, and much more humorous than expected. The Great Wall is entertaining and swift. Why is Matt Damon, a Caucasian American actor, the lead in a Chinese film? Don't let the negative, pre-release publicity influence you. Then there was the whole " whitewashing" controversy. My interest was not piqued, even though I have been an ardent fan of Zhang's work. I must admit to being underwhelmed by the trailers.
On the other are the meticulously choreographed warriors, who never seem less human than when joined together.Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall is a sleek monster film that befits the artistry of its director. On the one side are the monsters that - despite being nicely designed zeros and ones - suggest a wildness that cannot be denied. In “The Great Wall,” though, the bodies are divided into two distinct, oppositional configurations: the raw and the cooked. This transformation obviously takes on sinister meaning when such formations are adapted for, say, Nazi propaganda, as demonstrated in the film “ Triumph of the Will.” In such formations, bodies are abstracted into larger geometric shapes and people transform into a collective mass ornament. At times the effect brings to mind the German theorist Siegfried Kracauer’s ideas about Berkeley-like revues or, as he wrote in 1927, “indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics.” “The Great Wall” flirts with romance and bleats out a little propagandistic blather about the benefits of bilateral action, but the focus throughout remains on multitudes of shifting, surging bodies - human and beast, digital and not - that, as they ebb and flow, resemble a Chinese military pageant and a lavish Busby Berkeley number. He may be the headliner, but he’s also just one of this movie’s many, many whirring parts. Damon, wearing hair extensions and employing an on-and-off Irish accent, looks uncharacteristically ill at ease during much of this. Willem Dafoe, the whites of his eyes shining, is there, too, slinking around as Ballard, a Western prisoner who long ago also sought the black powder. He and a sidekick, Tovar (Pedro Pascal, from “Game of Thrones”), end up at the Great Wall, where after some macho posturing and chest thumping, they join forces with the wall’s guardians, including an English-speaking military genius, Lin Mae (Jing Tian) an adviser, Wang (Andy Lau) and an assortment of supporting glowerers (Hanyu Zhang, Eddie Peng Yu-Yen and Ling Gengxin). Damon), who’s trying to find what he calls “black powder,” a.k.a. The threadbare story turns on a swaggering mercenary, William (Mr. The whole thing plays out as if it had been thought up by someone who, while watching “Game of Thrones” and smoking a bowl, started riffing on walls, China and production money.
Set once upon a time, the movie spins a legend that never was: Every 60 years, slavering creatures emerge from beyond to sharpen their teeth on human bones and stuff their bellies on meat. Snarling digital monsters, a glowering Matt Damon and battalions of unfaltering Chinese warriors mix it up in “The Great Wall,” a painless, overstuffed spectacle that works overtime as a testament to China’s might.
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