An average movie

To be honest, I wasn't really expecting much from this flick but since I have a weak spot for Matt Damon, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, unfortunately, it turned out to be indeed pretty weak, I'm afraid. Basically, the whole thing was a rather pathetic attempt to deliver a movie that could be a major blockbuster in China but also in the rest of the world. Eventually, nobody cared much for the damned thing. I mean, it was a pretty cool idea to have Zhang Yimou, one of the most famous Chinese directors, working on a huge epic with Matt Damon, after all, the guy had made 'Hero' and 'House of Flying Daggers' which were pretty awesome. However, the fact that the damned thing had been written by 6 American guys was not really a good omen though. And, indeed, the writting was probably the weakest point in this flick. As long as they focused on the Chinese characters, it was nothing really amazing but, at least, it was watchable and the costumes and set design were also pretty awesome. However, each time they focused on Matt Damon's character, it never really worked. Indeed, as usual with Yimou, the Chinese characters didn't elaborate much about themselves or anything in general which made them intriguing but, every 30 secondes, you would have either Matt Damon or Pedro Pascal giving their analysis as if they were commenting a football game which was just so annoying. The fact that Damon gave here one of his weakest performances didn't help either. Seriously, if they would have made this movie without the Western characters, the whole thing would have been vastly improved. Anyway, I guess my rating might be rather generous here, somehow, I still think the damned thing had some potential but there is no doubt that it was a failure. 

6/10