Waiting for Lightning Video

Waiting for Lightning represents a war, a struggle of duality in documentary form. This 90-minute look at the life of skateboarder Danny Way and his insane but inspiring attempt to skateboard across and over the Great Wall of China, at its core, is unable to make these strands connect naturally. The film is well-made, certainly, and Way’s daring folly in China is fascinating. As hypnotic as it can be to watch him skate up and down a half-pipe, though, Danny Way’s story feels a bit too slight to fill out a feature-length film.
The biographical aspects of Way’s life are interspersed with the lead-up to the fateful stunt in 2005. Waiting for Lightning posits that Way, whose father died when Danny was very young, was innately equipped to pick up a skateboard and try new stunts, even if he got bruised on the way down. The traumas that forged him, we’re led to believe, are what made him such a great skateboarder. In the buildup to the actual jump on the Great Wall of China, we see Way create a so-called Megaramp that enables him to break world records for the longest jump by a skateboarder (and also hurt himself badly on national television), among other feats of derring-do.