REVIEW: ‘The Great Wall’ a hybrid that doesn’t come together

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are pretty freaking awesome. Peanut butter plus chocolate. So simple. So delicious. This is the kind of hybrid that really works, a fusion to two different things that end up being awesome together. “The Great Wall,” a fusion of Chinese and Hollywood filmmaking, is a different kind of hybrid. The kind that’s far less satisfying.

“The Great Wall” is built on a cool idea: the Chinese built The Great Wall as a barrier for a whole bunch of monsters. The titular wall is stumbled up by William (Matt Damon) and Tovar (Pedro Pascal), two mercenaries in China on a treasure hunt. They’re swept up into the conflict between a legion of soldiers and the aforementioned monsters. That’s it, as far as overarching story goes.

There is some pretty cool stuff in “The Great Wall.” The movie is beautifully shot and a joy to look at. Director Yimou Zhang certainly knows how to compose pretty shots. The buildup to the opening battle scene is fascinating. The army guarding this wall is like a Swiss Army knife. Just when you think there are no more cool weapons left, a new surprise pops out.

The first big battle scene is killer. It’s like the Helm’s Deep battle in “The Two Towers” on steroids. It’s a ballet of blades and arrows and big, flaming metal balls. And Tian Jing, who plays Commander Lin Mae, the leader of the monster resistance force, is achingly beautiful.

The problem here is that everything else, from the writing to the acting to the way the movie has been cut together, is awful.

What we get is a movie that starts out pretty great, grinds to a halt and tears itself into little pieces.

Start with the biggest chink in “The Great Wall”’s armor: the acting. Most of the cast is wooden enough to build a roll top desk out of. For the Chinese actors, it might have something to do with delivering lines in English instead of their native language. Willem Dafoe shows up and is hammy enough to be baked up for Christmas dinner.

But the worst performance here comes from Damon. Holy crap, does he look like he’d rather be someplace else. He phones it in so hard, he should change his name to “Sprint.”

The story isn’t very well put together. It takes it’s time to build the world and introduce the characters and their situation. That stuff works. But after the first big battle, the whole movie falls apart. It seems as if the story had pieces taken out without any regard for the flow. Scenes appear out of thin air without any connection to the material before or after. The ending feels like it was a result of being told to cut it off, instead drawing to a natural close.

And I can’t forget to mention the dialogue. Bland, bland, bland. Attempts at wit or humor falls flat. I hope the dialogue works better for foreign audiences. I don’t want them to be as bored as I was.

My guess is that a lot of the flaws this flick carries are the result of trying to make a movie that appeals to American and Chinese audiences equally. That must be why Damon and Dafoe are here. The Chinese box office is second to the domestic B.O. these days, so making Chinese/U.S. hybrid movie makes a lot of sense. But it doesn’t work for “The Great Wall.” What we get is a movie that starts out pretty great, grinds to a halt and tears itself into little pieces.

“The Great Wall” is far from the worst movie ever. But it seems to have been a calculated move to fuse American and Chinese movie making in order to get butts in seats. There are some very cool scenes featuring things you won’t see anywhere else. The best way to go is to wait until someone makes a supercut of the best stuff from “The Great Wall” and just watch that instead.

2 Indy Fedoras out of 5

MPAA Rating: PG-13