The Matt Damon movie so bad even his children hate it: “I hope to never have that feeling again”
It says a lot about Matt Damon that, despite working solidly for the last three decades, he hasn’t made many bad movies. Obviously, he’s made a few, but unlike Ben Affleck, most of his worst efforts are noble failures, as opposed to catastrophic abominations.
He’s been averaging at least two new releases per year since 1997, too, which means his instincts must be pretty good. No actor can work that often over so many years without making a misstep every now and then, but even the bottom of Damon’s barrel finds him surrounded by some of the best in the business.
Some of his worst-reviewed features include Suburbicon, which was directed by George Clooney with a script that initially hailed from the Coen brothers, The Monuments Men, another Clooney vehicle that boasted a star-studded cast that also numbered Bill Murray, John Goodman, and Cate Blanchett, and All the Pretty Horses, which could have been a career high if Harvey Weinstein hadn’t ruined it.
Of course, he’s been responsible for some completely forgettable fare, like The Brothers Grimm, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Downsizing, but those duds still allowed him to work with talents like Terry Gilliam, Robert Redford, Will Smith, Heath Ledger, and Alexander Payne, so they weren’t a total loss.
However, some turds will always remain un-polishable, and for Damon, it came when he decided to jump on one of Hollywood’s shortest-lived bandwagons. For a few years, with the nation exploding to rival the United States as a market for cinema, a deluge of American stars decided to appear in Chinese productions.
A big-budget fantasy blockbuster hailing from one of their generation’s finest auteurs should have been a winner, but Zhang Yimou’s excellence deserted him when he helmed The Great Wall. It had a fantastic premise, that the titular structure was built to defend China from giant monsters, but the execution was sorely lacking, with the star admitting that “I never want to have that feeling again.”
It made almost $335 million at the box office, but due to the exorbitant production and marketing costs, it still lost a fortune. It was massively disappointing, given the calibre of actors and the stature of its director, and nobody hates The Great Wall more than Damon. Well, except for maybe his children.
The mindless epic may have left him feeling miserable, depressed, and cursed with the realisation that he was making a shitty flick he couldn’t do anything about, and his oldest daughter, Isabella, won’t pass up an opportunity to remind him. “Whenever she talked about the movie, she calls it The Wall,” he said.
“And I’m like, ‘Come on, it’s called The Great Wall,” Damon explained. “And she’s like, ‘Dad, there’s nothing great about that movie.'” She’s right, and since her old man agrees, it’s not as if she’ll be grounded for calling him out on arguably his most egregious crime against cinema.
