Granted, John Wick: Chapter Two was a sequel and those tend to get off to faster starts, while The Great Wall has a Holiday to help boost its legs.
But William, who came to China in search of gunpowder, is a formidable archer and a good soul who can’t resist helping the soldiers who captured him, especially since their anti-monster campaign is being led by the lissome Commander Lin (Jing Tian), a young woman warrior of unlimited courage, if limited interest in a hot love affair. The Great Wall earned just 970,000 during its midnight previews, which is significantly less than half of what John Wick: Chapter Two managed just last weekend. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects. The allegory states that there exists prisoners chained together in a cave. He also seems to be channeling his inner Charlton Heston-his character, known only as William, is stolid as a fence post, except for occasional moments of fugitive charm. Plato’s 'Allegory of the Cave' is a concept devised by the philosopher to ruminate on the nature of belief versus knowledge. Damon doing here? Mainly providing a star presence for an expensive movie that was produced, with extensive English dialogue, for the international market. That isn’t a bad idea for a fantasy, but the computer-generated monsters, like the film as a whole, are numbingly repetitive, and devoid of any power to move, scare or stir us.Īnd what, you may ask, is Mr. The Great Wall of China wasn’t built to keep out the Mongol hordes, as we’ve been told, but to keep out these digital hordes (who were not, as far as we’re told, asked to finance its construction).
#THE GREAT WALL MOVIE SUMMARY PLUS#
The organizing principle of “The Great Wall” is Lots-lots of Chinese and American money lavished on a remarkably dull spectacle in which lots of medieval Chinese soldiers, plus a European mercenary played by Matt Damon, struggle to repel successive attacks from lots-and we’re talking in the zillions now-of ravening, slavering beasts that behave a lot like zombies.