Matt Damon helped out with English dialogue in The Great Wall

Aside from a nifty scene involving whistling arrows and mist, though, there’s no trace of Zhang’s brilliance in The Great Wall, an uninvolving feature-length retread of the Battle of Helm’s Deep in which the bad guys are ravenous, interchangeably computer-generated monster-aliens called the Tao Tie – an unmodulated big finish. It has brought in $225 million overseas.

The costumes in The Great Wall are, like, really attractive.

The film’s set in the 11th century with Damon playing William Garin, a mercenary in search of black powder. The story is about foreign mercenaries who come to China and they get caught in a battle between the Chinese and the monsters.

The film is one of the most high-profile projects in a hotly watched collaboration between Hollywood and China, yet reviews so far are poor and industry experts are predicting “The Great Wall” won’t do very well at North American box offices. That’s appropriate, since she and her cohorts defend China’s capital from the Taotie, ravenous reptilian monsters with a strong family resemblance to Godzilla. The Chinese government approved a record 89 co-productions past year, of which 10 are with US studios, according to state media. The big wall, in fact.

The Chinese film market is increasingly influential in Hollywood, with Chinese financing flowing to a diverse array of USA projects, and studio films increasingly catering to the tastes of Chinese audiences, resulting in more action, more spectacle, more humor. “That was the hardest job”. Between the Latin actor’s wit and charisma and some much-needed script work by Bourne franchise’s Tony Gilroy and Narcos team Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, the actual dialogue and banter between characters is often quite amusing and sharp.

The directorial work of House of Flying Daggers’ Yimou Zhang, The Great Wall is a visually spectacular and thrilling action movie experience – which doesn’t save it from often being incredibly silly and hokey, as well.

It’s fun, but it’s not enough to save “The Great Wall” from the weight of its exhausted conventions. The same group bought movie-theater chain AMC in 2012.

Chinese money has been flooding into Hollywood recently.

The critical responses speak to the challenges ahead for US and Chinese filmmakers looking to succeed in both markets. Another issue is a lack of internationally well known Chinese actors, said Bock. But the sheer volume of CGI beasts actually undercuts their menace a bit, and wide shots of them piling on top of each other to get over the Great Wall are evocative of the zombie attacks from 2013’s “World War Z” (which actually makes sense when you see the author, Max Brooks, with a story credit).

But despite a production cost of $150 million – the most expensive US-Chinese co-production to date – the results aren’t getting much love from the critics.

That said, the script itself is mostly corn, and broadly predictable. It’s amusing to see a Chinese/American blockbuster where the would-be virtues of western individualism are all-but-villainized, but again you knew that going in. “There is no creative stuff going on”.

Unless you follow this stuff, you’ve probably never heard of Monster Hunt, The Mermaid, or Journey to the West 2: The East Strikes Back, but these films were colossal smash hits in China over the last few years. American audiences tend to view Asians on screen as an “other”, even when they’re playing American characters.