The Great Wall review – Matt Damon epic delivers spectacle but not soul

Long-awaited Chinese-Hollywood epic The Great Wall has finally hit screens in China, testing the water for a new period in US-China film cooperation. The action adventure was helmed by superstar Chinese director Zhang Yimou, backed by Chinese-owned Hollywood studio Legendary, with a cast featuring Chinese A-listers as well as Matt Damon, making it the most expensive film ever made in China.

Hollywood has been keen to court China’s enormous viewing public, with US studios making a series of concerted plays for their share of the market. When The Great Wall was announced, the Chinese cinema box office was on a never-ending upwards trajectory, with audience revenue growing nearly 60-fold in just over a decade to 2015, and cinema development racing at a dizzying pace of 27 new screens per day. However, viewing figures have fallen consecutively for the last quarter: takings in November were down 5% on the same month a year earlier, following a 19% drop in October and a 33% annual decline in September. Nonetheless, China is still expected to become the biggest moviegoing market in the world by 2019, and state restrictions over international film screenings are pushing film-makers to find new ways to enter the market. International collaborations are an obvious solution to bypassing strict state controls. December is the busiest month for Chinese cinemas, which are hoping The Great Wall will help bring back crowds after a few months of mediocre new releases.

Fitting, then, that the film centres as much on China’s relationship with foreigners as the legend of the Taotie, a group of flesh-eating monsters who scale the Great Wall every 60 years to feed. Foreign mercenaries William Garin (Matt Damon) and Pero Tovar (Game of Thrones’ Pedro Pascal) unwittingly stumble upon the wall while fleeing tribesmen, greeted by an enormous army and the stunning sweep of the enormous structure rising from the mist.

Their claims to be traders are swiftly debunked and Garin falls over himself to demonstrate his skills a fighter, earning the gradual respect of the so-called Nameless Order and its leader, General Shao (Zhang Hanyu). After displaying an ability to leap in headfirst and slash green-blooded monsters, Garin lends his support to deputy Commander Lin (played by a wooden Jing Tian), while a baffled Tovar plans his escape with the Order’s gunpowder.

Earlier allegations of “whitewashing” seem, in the main, unfounded. The foreigners really don’t cover themselves in glory; they run, steal and trick each other, providing occasional comic relief, while the Chinese demonstrate self-sacrifice and discipline. A dishevelled Garin spends much of the film struggling to comprehend the system the Order embodies, confused and humbled by the language and the culture. His life-saving acts of heroism are returned with just as much aplomb.

Meanwhile the Order does need all hands on deck, because things get gory very quickly. Barely 15 minutes into the film, soldiers are being dismembered by Taotie in a series of high-octane battles. There are plenty of watchable fight scenes, but countless missed opportunities to create suspense. Our first glimpse of the Taotie is an intriguingly enormous green claw discovered by Tovar and Garin, but it is barely minutes before the beast is revealed in all its CGI glory.

And after that revelation, the story has little mileage. Every predictable turn comes to pass, and most major developments loom so large it’s a wonder the elite fighters don’t spot them. Aside from the nods to Chinese culture, there is little to differentiate between this and any other Hollywood action adventure.

It won’t be remembered as Zhang’s best film, but the director’s artistic touch is on display in his long panoramic sweeps and artful use of colour. Simultaneously futuristic and historic, the visual spectacle carries the film, while Zhang manages to include plenty of promised “Chinese elements”, including a beautiful shot of traditional sky lanterns at one character’s funeral.

By its end, The Great Wall leaves you with the feeling that it must be a metaphor – after all, the Taotie were, according to legend, brought down by their own greed – but hazy about what exactly the moral is. Is it a warning over rampant Chinese consumerism? A caution against marauding foreigners and invading foreign values? A reminder about the power of collectivism over individualism? Or is it really just a good old romp between goodies and baddies?

While the plot is straightforward and twists largely non-existent, The Great Wall succeeds as a no-nonsense visual extravaganza with plenty of adventure, and has been generally well-received by domestic audiences. Whether it has done enough to differentiate itself and achieve mainstream international success remains to be seen.

Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke joins Star Wars' Han Solo spin-off

Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke will swap dragons for intergalactic space travel after it was confirmed that she will join the cast of the yet-to-be-named Han Solo spin-off film.

The British actor joins Alden Ehrenreich, who will play Solo, and Donald Glover, who was confirmed for the role of Lando Calrissian in October.

The film is to take place before Star Wars: A New Hope and will focus on the formative years of Solo and Calrissian as they became space smugglers and, as Lucasfilms put it, “scoundrels on the rise”.

Clarke’s confirmation as the female lead in the film comes after rumors that Tessa Thompson, Naomi Scott and Zoe Kravitz were in consideration for the role. Other actors in the running were relative unknown Kiersey Clemons and Clarke’s fellow Game of Thrones star, Jessica Henwick.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens made more than $2bn at the box office while Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which opens in December, has been tipped to help its parent company, Disney Films, make a record-breaking $7bn at the box office in 2016.

The spin-off is scheduled to start filming in January and will come to the big screen in May 2018.

Why Deadpool 2 Will Survive The Setback

This week, the production of Deadpool 2 was struck a blow. It has been reported that Tim Miller, director of the first Deadpool, is leaving the project due to creative differences. This is unquestionably a setback, as it's a key vacancy that will require time and proper vetting to fill -- but now is not the time for fans to panic about the anticipated sequel. Yes, Miller's presence on the project will certainly be missed, but there's every reason to be entirely confident in the three remaining members of the brain trust behind the big screen Merc With The Mouth: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Ryan Reynolds.

While there's no denying that Tim Miller was an important member of the Deadpool team for an incredibly long time -- first signing on as director in April 2011 - he only came on following years of work from Reese, Wernick and Reynolds, who truly laid the foundation of the post-modern, exceptionally funny, eternally faithful comic book adaptation. With the exception of a few characters and sequences that were ultimately cut for budgetary reasons, the script that made the film soar was mostly in its finished form at least as far back as 2010, including the impressive non-linear structure, and full pages of dialogue.

Unlike most superhero blockbusters that get $150 million to wow audiences with ridiculous spectacle, the limited budget and smaller scale of Deadpool made it truly depend on the sharpness of its script -- and it was that sharpness that kept the project fighting through years and years of development hell until it finally got made. The film could never feature a giant battle against an army of aliens... or really an army of any kind, but it succeeded by focusing on character -- which made it uproariously funny thanks to the sheer awesomeness of its titular hero, but also unique within the genre. Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Ryan Reynolds were the three men responsible for that, and given that the plan is to once again keep Deadpool 2 tight and small-scaled, it's hard not to remain confident in what the sequel can deliver.

Absolutely none of this is meant to diminish Tim Miller's contributions on the first Deadpool, as the movie probably couldn't have been made and exist in the form that it does without his particular expertise. Coming from the world of visual effects as the founder of Blur Studio, the director's background meant that the small production was able to push its budget far further than most filmmakers would have been able to do, and that clearly turned out to be massively important (in terms of the quality visuals in the film, but also just in 20th Century Fox giving the project the green light). Incredibly significant as that contribution was, however, the fantastic box office numbers mean that particular skill won't be as significant when it comes to making Deadpool 2. The first Merc With The Mouth movie is now the most successful title in the X-Men franchise, and while the sequel won't change things much scale-wise, the studio will surely be giving the production all the money it needs to be a success.

The news of Tim Miller leaving Deadpool 2 is definitely disappointing news for fans. We will miss the particularly fun and appropriate style he brought to the 2016 blockbuster, and who ever winds up sitting in the director's chair will have some absolutely massive shoes to fill. That being said, fans have no reason to worry about the upcoming sequel, as it is still very much in appropriate and capable hands. And if you need assurance of that, all you need to do is remember who's described as "The Real Heroes Here" in Deadpool's opening credits.

Little Men review – five-star foray into money worries

This painful, complex, beautifully acted and inexpressibly sad drama from Ira Sachs is about something that looms large in real life, but never usually gets acknowledged in the movies in any but the vaguest way – banal, undignified embarrassment over money, and the deadly serious damage this causes.

This film is very different from the general run of ingratiating middlebrow indies that pop up on screen periodically, drenched with implausibility, sentimentality and lame bet-hedging humour. Like his previous film Love Is Strange, Sachs’s Little Men is composed with scrupulous observational intelligence and care. It is really engaging.

This is a film about what gentrification means in real terms, and it reminded me of Laurence Fishburne’s speech on this subject from John Singleton’s 1991 movie Boyz N the Hood: that gentrification is a hostile act, an exploitation of communities, and something to be resisted. Yet the exploiters, the incomers, can be decent people with agonisingly good intentions, muddled by suspicions and difficult, almost feudal loyalties of their own.

Greg Kinnear plays Brian, a struggling New York actor; the breadwinner is his wife Kathy, played by Jennifer Ehle; their sensitive teenage son Jake (Theo Taplitz) wants to be an artist. When Brian’s dad dies, the family’s money worries appear to be over: he has left Brian a large, handsome apartment in upwardly mobile Brooklyn – at present, they have a cramped place in Manhattan. The apartment comes with a sitting tenant: downstairs is a dress shop, which has been there for years, run by the harassed and hardworking Leonor (Paulina García). Brian is now entitled to the rental income, though his soppy old dad charged Leonor only a fraction of the market rate, and her lease is now up for renewal.

Brian’s only job at the moment is a part in a profit-share production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, he realises that his career can only go downhill from here and he needs money. Increasing Leonora’s rent is a very obvious way to secure his financial future, and he is in any case under pressure to do so from his sister Audrey (Talia Balsam), herself entitled to half this rent, and with money issues of her own. So Brian – liberal, well-meaning and self-pitying – is steeling himself for this horrifically difficult conversation with his neighbour when he realises that his lonely son has become best friends with Leonor’s son Tony (Michael Barbieri), a wannabe actor, and so he actually owes Leonor and her family a very important debt.

It is a kind of nightmare, and another kind of movie might want to escalate this situation generically into broad satirical comedy or psychological horror. But Sachs keeps it rigorously at the level of embarrassing real life, and the characterisation and narrative developments are not forced on us; we are kept a step away, with scenes that do not appear at first to have obvious narrative relevance, like Tony’s drama improv class.

Sachs and his screenwriting partner Mauricio Zacharias show all the ways in which confrontation causes everyone to overplay their hand and put themselves in the wrong. Feeling understandably cornered by Brian and Kathy’s casual visits – they want, after all, nothing other than to increase her rent threefold – Leonor becomes coldly angry, pointing out to Brian that she had a real friendship with his late father, clumsily claiming that she knew him better than Brian. Later, Brian overreacts to what he perceives as Tony’s ill manners, and this grown man makes a petulant outburst that is a wince-making misjudgment.

Michael Barbieri and Theo Taplitz give truly outstanding performances as Tony and Jake: a delicate, nuanced friendship – Tony is bold, confident, charming and humorous, the extrovert to Jake’s introvert. In a way it is like first love, and the film suggests that this might be something more than friendship, but probably isn’t, and there are in any case no cliches and no stereotypes. Tony and Jake might under other circumstances occupy the entire space of the film: it could have been a kind of platonic version of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, and there is a kind of understated, almost subliminal gay sensibility to the film that is a part of its shrewdness and emotional acuity.

Yet Jake and Tony’s lives are balanced with those of their parents. Their final scene has something desperately sad: it is where the film achieves a strangely literary quality, like an exceptionally powerful short story. Film-making this intelligent is such a treat.

Johnny Depp: an unruly misfit who has a troubled relationship with fame

Buccaneer. Troubadour. Beatnik cowboy. The words that have been used to describe Johnny Depp through the decades make him sound less like an actor and more like a rogue character from a children’s book. They also go a long way to explaining the strange mythology that surrounds Depp, who has become one of Hollywood’s most bankable and highest paid stars, all while maintaining the persona of an unruly misfit.

 These inherent contradictions are a key part of his charm: the thoughtful actor who openly discussed his drug habit, whose greatest friends have been Hunter S Thompson and Marlon Brando, a Hollywood sex symbol whose cultural cachet now lies mainly in family films.

High-profile romances with Winona Ryder and Kate Moss helped turn him into a tabloid obsession, and the scandals that have dogged the 53-year-old’s life have played out very publicly in the press, much to his loathing. But few have been quite so ugly and acrimonious as his recent split from Amber Heard, who he started dating in 2012 after splitting from his long-term partner and mother of his children, Vanessa Paradis.

The allegations of domestic violence emerged in May, when Heard claimed Depp had physically abused her, throwing an iPhone at her during a fight, and she sought a restraining order. It prompted Paradis to write a public letter supporting her ex, and in June Heard decided not to press charges. Depp denies the allegations.


But in papers reportedly due to be presented in court on Wednesday, for a hearing on Heard’s restraining order against Depp, she alleged that a month after they were married, while on the phone to one another in different countries, Depp smashed bottles and cut off the tip of his finger after hitting a plastic phone against a wall while drunk and high on ecstasy. He then allegedly dipped his bloody finger in blue paint and wrote on a mirror, accusing Heard of having an affair with the actor Billy Bob Thornton, according to the celebrity news website TMZ. The pair reached a divorce settlement of $7m (£5.3m) on Tuesday, which Heard has donated to two charities, including the American Civil Liberties Union to prevent violence against women.

For an actor whose Hollywood assets are indelibly linked to the family film franchise Pirates of the Caribbean, being at the centre of such an acrimonious rumour mill could ruin a career. His biggest films of the past decade, since his first outing as Captain Jack Sparrow in 2003, have all been directed at a young audience – Finding Neverland, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Rango and Into the Woods.


Nick Johnstone, the author of a recent Depp biography, said he believed the respect for Depp’ as an actor would not be tainted by the recent saga.

“Many of his fans felt a sense of concern when he left Vanessa Paradis as his relationship with her and their children and that sense of family and home seemed to anchor Johnny,” Johnstone said. Depp’s “misfit child-heartedness”, exemplified by his numerous Tim Burton collaborations, was central to his continued roles in children’s and family films, and that was unlikely to change in the eyes of Hollywood, Johnstone said.

He drew parallels between Depp and his mentor Brando, who had an often controversial public profile. “Hollywood respects Johnny Depp enormously – look at the length and varying box office success of his career and you see trust and forgiveness and deep belief – so I think his career is still very important to Hollywood, bad press or not.”

The world was not always so forgiving to Depp. He was born in June 1963 in small-town Kentucky. His father was a civil engineer and his mother, Betty Sue, a coffee shop waitress to whom Depp was devoted until her death this year. The youngest of four children, Depp was seven when the family moved to Florida, living in a succession of motels before settling down. He later said that by the time he was 15 the family had lived in about 20 different houses.

“I wouldn’t say my youth was the perfect model in terms of raising a kid,” he told Rolling Stone. “It was a relatively violent upbringing. If you did something wrong, you got hit. If you didn’t do something wrong, you got hit. But my parents, they did the best they could with what they knew.”

He dropped out of school at 16 to pursue a career in music, having played clubs in Miami from the age of 13 to try to help pay the rent, and in 1983 moved to Los Angeles in search of a record deal. Acting was never his intention but after a stint selling pens over the phone, Depp was cast in 21 Jump Street, the role that would catapult him into the hearts of teenagers across the US.

“Music is still my first love as much as it ever was, since I was a little kid and first picked up a guitar and tried to figure out how to make the thing go,” Depp said recently. “Going into acting was an odd deviation from a particular road that I was on in my late teens, early 20s, because I had no desire, no interest, really, in it at all.”

He got his first leading role in the 1990 John Waters juvenile delinquent spoof Cry-Baby, swiftly followed in 1991 by the first of his many collaborations with Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands (which almost never happened because Depp cancelled their first meeting). He went on to turn down roles in some of the biggest films of the decade – Speed, Titanic, Interview With the Vampire and Indecent Proposal – in favour of cult films such as Blow, Arizona Dream and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It was also here that Depp’s troubled relationship with fame came to the fore, particularly through his relationship with Moss and his ownership of the Viper Room, the club outside which the actor River Phoenix died from an overdose in 1993. Depp admitted turning to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism to deal with the prying media. He told the Guardian in 2011: “I mean, all those films [Edward Scissorhands, Blow] didn’t do well at the box office. But I still had paparazzi chasing my tail, so it was the weirdest thing in the world. Everywhere you went you were on display. It was always some kind of strange attack on the senses; I was never able to embrace it. So self-medication (meaning drink and drugs) was just to be able to deal with it.”


In a desperate attempt to escape the intrusions of the press, Depp would camp out at Thompson’s house in Woody Creek, Colorado, and he recalls a time in 1997 when “we were like a couple of roommates. I went on to Hunter’s hours. We’d go to sleep about nine or 10 in the morning and be up for breakfast at about 7pm. He took care of me ... He knew I worshipped him, and I know that he loved me, so he may have been part father figure, part mentor, but I’d say the closest thing is brothers. We were like brothers.”

Things changed for Depp in 1998, when he met the French model Paradis, and the pair had their first child, Lily-Rose, a year later. It was partly what convinced Depp to take the part in Pirates of the Caribbean (“I don’t know why I said yes to that. I didn’t think, ‘I must do a commercial movie’”), which he was convinced would be a flop.

Having children, and playing Jack Sparrow, helped Depp address his anger issues, which he admitted had always been a battle for him as a result of his “conditioning and upbringing”. “I still have a hellish temper,” he said in 2005. “It’s diminished a little, but rage is still never very far away … I still have that stuff in me, the hillbilly rage as it’s been called. I may even break a television set here and there; it just doesn’t get written about because I’m not doing it in a hotel.”

Aside from 2015’s Black Mass, it has been a while since Depp starred in a film with any critical kudos, and for the moment it appears meaty upcoming roles are thin on the ground. His known future film projects are a new Pirates of the Caribbean in 2017, which is in post-production, and voicing Sherlock Gnomes in another Gnomeo & Juliet animation in 2018.

But with a career trajectory like few others, it is hard to say whether retirement or resurgence is on Depp’s horizon – as he said himself in 2013. “I was well on my way to thermos-and-lunchbox antiquity for – I don’t know, a good 18 years.” Retirement, he said, was a daily thought: “I can’t say that I’d want to be doing this for another 10 years.”