The Great Wall

Matt Damon may be the big draw for western audiences approaching this big-budget US/Chinese co-production, but you can't help feeling he looks uncomfortably out of place. He stars as a mercenary in the Middle Ages who is captured by warriors stationed on the Great Wall of China and joins them as they fend off an army of demonic, dragon-like creatures. The high-flying crane shots and stunning landscapes captured by director Zhang Yimou suggest this could be an epic to rival his House of Flying Daggers, but the film quickly unravels amid some painfully obvious-looking CGI, half-baked mythology and hollow moralising. Among the rest of the cast, Willem Dafoe plays a prisoner on the wall gone stir crazy. You, too, may feel similarly bewildered after stumbling upon this big, stony hunk of nothing.