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For instance, Matt Damon is a fine actor in many respects, but his range for accents is roughly Southie to Somerville, and it’s a toss-up whether he stumbles in his attempt to do an English accent or whether Zhang went with the takes that had the best rhythms to a Mandarin-speaker. That casual-seeming attitude makes the film breezier than it might have been, even if the characters’ banter is often done in their second languages or for a director whose command of the primary language used is limited, as Zhang’s English may be.
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That William and Lin are going to have to learn to work together and bring their unique talents to bear on the problem is a given that they’ll just do it without anybody making a speech about it is certainly not. There’s an elegance to how Zhang and the Western writers generally tend to build the film around celebrating the Chinese values of stability and everybody pulling in the same direction while still finding ways for William’s out-of-the-box thinking to be a major contribution without ever elevating one too far over the other, let alone making on-screen points about it. Zhang mostly keeps the “clash” part of it low-key, letting Matt Damon show how impressed William is at the scale of the Wall and skill of the army within it via glances that are more curious than wide-eyed. These sort of clash-of-culture stories can be difficult balancing acts one only has to look back a couple of weeks to the twin “Chinese guys have adventures in India” movies that came out for the lunar new year to see how easy it is to stumble into banal platitudes or tacky caricatures. The three of them may be able to escape if they work together, but William is starting to see a nobility in this fight. Commander Lin Mae (Jing Tian) needs to be convinced, while William and Tovar can’t help but notice that the other Westerner there, Ballard (Willem Dafoe), hasn’t been allowed to leave since he came on a similar quest decades ago. Fortunately, they reach the immense Great Wall of China soon after that, and while General Shao (Zhang Hanyu) leans toward killing the outsiders, Strategist Wang (Andy Lau Tak-wah) thinks that what they’ve seen could be useful in the fight against the monstrous Tao-Tie. It kicks off from the Western perspective, with a group of mercenaries having rode six months and lost many of their party in an attempt to reach China and acquire their mysterious “black powder” superweapon, but their numbers are cut even further when they’re attacked, and good fortune leaves just William (Matt Damon) and Tovar (Pedro Pascal) alive, with a severed arm that is not human and green blood on on William’s sword. Sure, in some ways director Zhang Yimou and his pan-Pacific team sometimes stumble into a good time, but it’s mostly a matter of creating an amusing, pulpy adventure story rather than getting caught up in what the producers have riding on their work.
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I had a whole opening paragraph about how even the animation of the studio logo at the start of "The Great Wall" served to illustrate how the current attempts to engineer world-wide hits that played equally well in China and the West was a fool’s errand, but then something unexpected happened: The movie was kind of fun. " Not quite an event, but surprisingly entertaining."