The Great Wall (2016)

This is Zhang Yimou's epic fantasy movie, and he pulled off an incredible feat of the imagination. I describe it as fantasy versus historical, because the monsters did not exist in historical times. The CGI was amazing, and took me back to the advent of Lord of the Rings. The movie was fast-paced, and the two hours zipped by quickly. I looked forward to this movie because of Andy Lau and Lu Han.

Matt Damon stepped up the plate in his first Chinese movie, as an European mercenary in China during the Song dynasty.  Damon's only flaw was the American accent, that did not match the job title.

Jing Tian was credible as Commander Lin Mae.

Andy Lau showed his competency in the second language.  I was very impressed that the scriptwriter entrusted a lot of English dialog to his character, the military strategist.  Andy Lau should have received third billing.

Lu Han did a very good job as the apprentice soldier, whose work experience was in the kitchen.

The monsters looked like relatives of the alien species in the Alien movies.

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"The Great Wall" didn’t really deliver much except for a decent, all too simple story and some good actors wasted on dull characters. The concept was pretty interesting but fell flat because of the shallow characters and boring, overdone storytelling style.

You never really care who lives or dies, if the wall would fall or the entire capital for that matter. Even though there’s a lot of great actors in the movie, you can’t really tell because of how lacking the movie is. There’s no real build up between the main characters and their friendship, which once again fails to make you engaged in the story. This makes all the dialogues throughout the movie oddly empty, like they’re reciting it all before filming the real deal.

A lot of scenes didn’t make any sense, especially some of the action scenes that obviously wasn’t well thought-out, but solely made to look good on the screen.

With that said, if you need a flat and easy action movie to watch a Sunday night I won’t stop you! There’s a reason why I gave the movie 4,5/10 instead of 1/10.

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