THE GREAT WALL (Rated PG-13)

The Great Wall of China was built to protect the populace and territory from invasion. Little did we know until the advent of the new Matt Damon film “The Great Wall” that the invading hordes were hideous monsters previously seen only roaming freely in fantasy movies.

As “The Great Wall” opens, Damon’s William Garin, a 12th century mercenary and trader, leads a group of battle-scarred warriors into the badlands of ancient Northern China in search of wealth and power.

One member of the group has knowledge that a powerful weapon, known as “black powder,” is in the possession of the Chinese, and its value would be tremendous if taken back to continental Europe.

Barely surviving a hair-raising scrape with desert tribes, William and his sidekick Pero Tovar (Pedro Pascal) recover a strange, magnetic stone and reach the Great Wall, where they have to surrender to an army of warriors known as the Nameless Order.

Imprisoned in the bustling military outpost of Fortress City, the two mercenary warriors meet another Westerner, Ballard (Willem Dafoe), who has the haggard look of someone plotting an improbable escape for several decades.

For their part, William and Pero attract the notice of General Shao (Hanyu Zhang) and Commander Lin (Jing Tian) because they had retrieved the severed claw of one of the beasts that are assumed to be nearly invincible.

These ugly creatures that look like leftovers from a cheesy science-fiction B-movie are called the Tao Tei, a breed of ancient, mystical beasts that rises every 60 years for eight days to feast upon humanity.

That day of reckoning has arrived, and though the Chinese are well-prepared, Commander Lin, a fierce female warrior, realizes that William’s archery skills would come in handy and thus he is enlisted to the cause of defending the fortress wall the Tao Tei ferociously seek to breach.

For a joint United States and China production that obviously cost a boatload of cash, “The Great Wall” is a mostly lackluster exercise in repetitive action with the beasts launching repeated attacks on the Great Wall, with the valiant Chinese soldiers fighting back.

The most dazzling of the action scenes involve female warriors that perform impressive aerial attacks on the monsters. Aside from these heroics, the battle scenes lack ongoing ingenuity because the recurring assaults soon become too monotonous.

Matt Damon has obviously done well with the Jason Bourne franchise, but his adeptness at physical action just doesn’t translate well to an ancient Chinese setting.

“The Great Wall” is an overall disappointment on several fronts.

TV Corner: ‘Taken’ on NBC Network

The amazing revelation is that the series “Taken” just might be operating in an alternate universe because the NBC Web site notes that in 30 years the TV character Bryan Mills is “destined to become the Bryan Mills that we’ve come to love from the ‘Taken’ films.”

The problem with this scenario is that the TV version of Bryan Mills (capably portrayed by Clive Standen, who is considerably younger than Neeson) is dealing with contemporary issues of terrorism and fighting drug cartels and assorted bad guys.

In seeking to be topical, the “Taken” TV series must, by necessity, remain rooted in the present-day to grapple with existing geopolitical conditions. And since the Liam Neeson character has not been catapulted into the future, we just have to overlook the anomaly.

Nevertheless, the intent with “Taken” the series is to come up with an edge-of-your-seat thriller that shows how former Green Beret Bryan Mills, already well-trained by the military, finds himself pulled into a career as a deadly, secret government operative.

The first episode establishes a personal tragedy for Bryan during a train trip, one for which he feels personally responsible given a previous deadly military mission resulted in a Colombian drug lord seeking vengeance that caused collateral damage.

Drawn back into covert action by Christina Hart (Jennifer Beals), the special deputy director of National Intelligence, Bryan joins a clandestine group with autonomy that seemingly only reports to the president. 

The operatives within this deep undercover organization are the usual hard-edged soldiers with special skills of their own, whether tracking suspects with high-tech equipment or supplying the muscle to extract victims of kidnapping plots.

Kidnapping, just like in the “Taken” film, is a major plot point in the episodes, and it does not always involve only Middle Eastern terrorists. One episode is devoted to corporate thugs holding a girl hostage to retrieve incriminating evidence from a whistleblower.

In any case, while the TV landscape is ripe with action series, “Taken” could be a worthwhile investment for a few episodes because Jennifer Beals and Clive Standen bring nuance to their characters, and the action scenes have a purpose beyond mere gunfights and explosions.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.