Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe can deliver top-notch performances, but they can’t do much with this script. Each of the characters does exactly what you’d expect them to, and the movie becomes a pastiche of scenes we’ve seen in other movies. Along the way, he must learn to trust people. Hordes of green monsters have besieged the Chinese for centuries, and Matt Damon shows up in the nick of time to help a beautiful Chinese general (Tian Jing) defeat them once and for all. What are the Chinese so afraid of? What enemy requires such a pile of stone and a weapon-wielding flying circus to keep it out? Alien-dragon-zombies. Red archers and black infantrymen do their thing while warrior women dressed in startling blue dive-bomb their enemies with the help of bungee cords. What he finds instead is a wall-a really big wall-defended by a fantastical army dressed in the colors of the rainbow. In “The Great Wall,” Matt Damon plays William, a medieval English mercenary, who walks all the way to China looking for the legendary black powder that can turn air into fire.
