The Great Wall

I’m no xenophobe, but the influence exerted by the Chinese market on mainstream American cinema is becoming undeniably overt in a way that would have been unthinkable in the early aughts when director Zhang Yimou was garnering critical and audience acclaim in the U.S. for films such as Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Chinese-American co-productions are now becoming the rule rather than the exception, and the Chinese movie market will outstrip the U.S. box office sometime this year if it continues to grow at its current pace. So what does this mean for the American moviegoing populace? Films that attempt to build mass appeal in two vastly different cultures on opposite ends of the globe but serve neither adequately. Enter The Great Wall.

The Great Wall is basically The Thirteenth Warrior meets Reign of Fire with an inexplicably cast Matt Damon — sporting an ill-defined and inconsistent Western European accent of some sort — wandering deep into China on a quest to steal the secret of gunpowder. After he and a fellow mercenary-bestie (Pedro Pascal) literally run into the titular Great Wall, they discover the Nameless Order, an army of highly trained Chinese militants in color-coded armor preparing for a massive battle against an unknown assailant. That assailant is a swarm of computer-animated monsters that look like some sort of dog-dinosaur hybrid H.P. Lovecraft might’ve come up with on a particularly off day. They can only be defeated by eye-gouging or (for reasons the script doesn’t feel compelled to address) magnets.

The story from there is about as predictable as they come, as Pascal betrays Damon under the influence of fellow foreigner Willem Dafoe, who looks almost as perplexed about his presence in this film as I was. Damon falls for tough Commander Lin Mae (Tian Jing) in a strictly noble, platonic sort of way and sticks around to save the day while his fellow European interlopers try to make off with the gunpowder. The whitewashing controversy that surrounded the film’s early promotion was not entirely unwarranted, as Hong Kong action-movie stalwarts such as Andy Lau take a backseat to Damon’s improbable heroics. However, the cast is far from the most problematic aspect of the film — Damon’s ridiculous accent aside.

In his first English-language outing, Yimou unfortunately seems to have lost his knack as one of the preeminent visual stylists of Asian cinema. While The Great Wall boasts the saturated colors and kinetic action that defined his earlier work, the computer-generated monsters and settings look like his grasp of the technology hasn’t evolved in over a decade. With the exception of a few brief scenes — aerialist female martial artists diving off the wall and sequences of drummers summoning the Order — that are distinctly reminiscent of the director’s work on the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, there is literally nothing that would distinguish The Great Wall as a Yimou film.

The Great Wall was toppled by The Lego Batman Movie in this week’s box office, but I have no doubt it will be a juggernaut in Chinese theaters. The motivation behind products such as The Great Wall is entirely economic — and, on that basis, it’s not an ill-considered film. Take into account that the story was conceived by Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai) and Max Brooks (Mel’s son), and you have a production that looks like either a joke or a cash grab conceived by a couple of white guys to exploit the burgeoning Chinese moviegoing populace — or, more likely, both. Still, it’s at least visually engaging, and far shorter than most strictly American CG spectacles of its ilk. It’s certainly not a great wall, but the line between “disappointing” and “bad” can be hard to ascertain at times. Rated PG-13 for sequences of fantasy action violence. English with brief subtitled Mandarin.

Now Playing at Carmike 10, Carolina Cinemark, Regal Biltmore Grande, Epic of Hendersonville.