It was just referenced enough to make me think “I get it! Matt Damon is the only thing keeping China from constant war with the West!” Fortunately, Good Will Hunting shows up to teach them that not all white people are bad. The Chinese general tells us every white man that has ever come to the Great Wall has done the same. His cohorts all try to steal from their Chinese hosts and run away.

Seriously, nothing tells an audience “the filmmaker thinks you’re an idiot” quite like an arrow being shot directly at the screen or a monster attacking three feet from your face.Īlso, there’s this weird subtext of Matt Damon being the world’s only honorable white man. The problem is that director Yimou Zhang relies on too many goofy shots like it’s 2007 and 3D is something none of us have ever seen before. The attacks by the Tao Tei are intense and chaotic and fun to watch. There is a scene where the army is using hot air balloons to catch the Tao Tei. The movie contains these beautiful landscape shots. Really, The Great Wall is an advertisement for fireworks. William decides he needs to help these people because he has a magnet in his bag and magnets make the monsters sleepy, and while they’re sleepy, you can blow the monsters up by attaching M80s and bottle rockets to their tails. Willem Dafoe shows up to turn Tovar into a villain. An old emperor was too greedy, so the gods sent the Tao Tei to China to eat people until the people acknowledge that greed is a bad thing. Every 60 years, they come to China to teach people to be nice by eating them. The arm came from a monster called the Tao Tei.

Instead, the pair are told that they are needed for the fight. They take the arm to the massive army stationed at the Great Wall of China, hoping to trade it for black powder. The rest of their party is killed, but William manages to kill their unseen assailant, who leaves behind a scaly green arm. While William and Tovar are in the mountains, they are attacked. Where William is from is anyone’s guess because his accent sounds like the result of someone telling Damon to “sound white and foreign.” It starts out British and then morphs into something close to Nick Offerman’s regular speaking voice. Matt Damon plays a thief named William, who is in China with his buddy Tovar (Narco’s Pedro Pascal) to steal black powder, take it back to the West, sell it and make a fortune. I mean, it has its share of problems and I’m glad I didn’t pay to see it, but I wouldn’t say I suffered through The Great Wall. I can also tell you that I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, and as much as I was bracing myself for this to be the next one, I didn’t think it was so bad.

Well, I’ve seen The Great Wall and I can tell you what it’s about. It’s an advertising trick we in the media like to call “polishing a turd.” It’s also impossible to tell from the ads exactly what the movie is about. It’s impossible to watch TV right now and not see an ad for The Great Wall.

The great wall movie monster