Movie Review: The Great Wall

A few days ago I saw Matt Damon on "The Late Show with James Corden" and he described his new movie "The Great Wall", while averting his eyes downward as "a series of attacks on the Great Wall of China by thousands of lizard-like creatures" and incredibly, that is entirely what this movie is all about. Rather than making this very bad mess of a film the producers could have come up so many better ideas that involve the Great Wall of China. This could include a documentary about the Great Wall, narrated by Matt Damon. A recreation of a major battle many centuries ago that involve the Great Wall. Perhaps a documentary that goes through the entire process and the decisions that were made for probably close to 2 years, that lead to the producers to make this ridiculous movie. A narration by Matt Damon where he explains how or why he ever decided to make this movie in the first place would be a better idea than making a movie this bad. Did Matt Damon owe someone a favor to did he lose a bet? On top of all this, making this bad movie also included moving for a long period of time to China to make perhaps the worst movie in his career.

There are a series of action scenes in this movie that summarize the absurdity of the whole 2 hours. On many occasions, Chinese soldiers in an attempt to kill these lizard creatures who are trying to climb up the Great Wall, bungee jump while holding a spear in an attempt to kill them, even though thousands of them are on the ground and climbing the wall and just about every attempt to kill these creatures using this stupid method, resulted in some soldier being eaten alive. You would think that after perhaps 2 futile attempts like this, they would figure out that this idea was not working? This is the same type of thinking that allowed for this movie to be produced in the first place. The idea of creating creating action scenes with CGI no matter how absurd is never going to rescue any bad movie.

When you consider the total budget for this film is 150 million dollars and hopefully this huge figure includes all of those costumes that had to be made its a wonder why any producer after reading this very bad script would be able to raise this amount of money to market a concept that is this bad. Essentially, the entire plot of this movie is: Matt Damon and his friend are attacked by a strange lizard creature, then they kill the creature and cut off its arm. Later they wind up captured by Chinese soldiers at the Great Wall of China and then are attacked by thousands of these creatures, several times. There is a small rock they find that is some kind of a magnet that they find has some control over them, and other than this there is really nothing more to this story.

This movie should have gone immediately to the DVD shelves. I am very surprised that Matt Damon decided to make this movie and as far as I have seen this is the worst movie of Damon's career. This film is yet another example that special effects will never be a band-aid for a bad script or a bad concept. Do yourself a favor and run from this waste of 2 hours.