The Wall faces barriers
Set in a sandy wasteland during the final days of the Iraq war in 2007, The Wall is a low-budget thriller that manages to be political and apolitical simultaneously.
Unlike most war movies, The Wall is uninterested in preaching any kind of morality, whether it’s the necessity or calamity of war, and instead uses a fleeting 81 minutes to clench the viewer into a gripping will-he-or-won ’the survival story.
The film has three characters: U.S. army counter-sniping team Sergeant Isaac (Aaron Taylor Johnson), Staff Sergeant Matthews (WWE star John Cena) and a mysterious Iraqi sniper just waiting to ensnare them in his trap.
Isaac and Matthews are the kind of bros whose exchanges with one another have devolved into homoerotic banter, swearing and dumb jokes about their genitalia.
After an incident that leaves Isaac wounded and alone hiding behind the remains of a bombedout school wall, the movie gets to its crux.
Isaac spends the rest of the story using a busted radio to talk to “Juba” (Laith Nakli), a sadistic, U.S.-trained Iraqi insurgent who has successfully captured dozens of U.S. soldiers in his spider web. Lacking a radio connection, water and a functional knee, Isaac has few options other than bleeding out — precisely the death Juba had planned for him.
But where there’s a will — or a wall — there’s a way for Isaac to survive his distant tormentor,
and for the viewer to actually enjoy a movie mostly set behind a bunch of decaying bricks.
For little more than a genre exercise, The Wall is exceptional in its direction. Director Doug Liman (The Edge of Tomorrow, The Bourne Identity) makes the most of the low-budget production set in a desert, ratcheting up tension about the sniper’s unknown location.
Taylor-Johnson is competent in a fairly demanding role, but when it comes to the central conversation, The Wall relies on staid maxims and ideas about U.S. foreign policy that are there only to flimsily flesh out the characters. Do we need to prove in every single U.S. film that Islamic terrorists are intelligent enough to understand and even appreciate Western culture, as The Wall does with Juba’s incessant quotes from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven? Or his constant badgering of Isaac’s continued role in the war?
The emotional resolution of that question never pays off because Isaac is never fleshed out as more than a video game character who must survive for the story to continue.
The Wall may be entertaining and masterfully directed, but it has nothing to say about war survival, other than a reductive depiction of its sheer difficulty.