Anti-American sniper

Compact, blunt and borderline exploitative, Doug Liman’s lean military thriller The Wall largely plays like a Max Fischer stage adaptation of American Sniper. It was actually a little shocking to read the credits and discover that the film was not adapted from a play, but rather came from an original screenplay by Dwain Worrell. Even the film’s aesthetic choices—the occasional blackout scene transitions, as well as the use of off-screen sound in a key climactic scene—seem as if they were made with the stage in mind rather than the screen.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson and John Cena play American soldiers in “post-war” Iraq sent to the middle of nowhere to investigate the murders of a group of civilian contractors and a security detail. They survey from afar long enough to assume the all-clear, but a closer inspection reveals that the victims were killed by precision sniper fire, and that the Iraqi perpetrator is still on the scene. Soon enough, Taylor-Johnson is dodging bullets behind a crumbling stone wall, taunted by the unseen gunman over his radio while a mortally wounded Cena slowly bleeds out in the crosshairs.

The rest of the film unfurls more or less in real time behind the wall (later revealed to be the remains of a bombed-out school), as Taylor-Johnson scrambles to reach Cena while also sussing out the location of the sniper. Meanwhile, the sniper tries to draw information from the wounded but still conscious Taylor-Johnson, including the nature of his attachment to a dead soldier’s damaged scope. At a fat-free 81 minutes, The Wall never becomes boring—it’s the kind of punchy, self-contained, midsized genre picture that they truly don’t make anymore.

However, once the cat-and-mouse nature of the setup is established, the midsection of the movie begins to feel like deep-sigh filler. It certainly doesn’t help that the film quickly becomes a one-man show for Taylor-Johnson, an actor with questionable screen presence and a familiar bag of tricks. With a more dynamic actor in the lead role, The Wall might have had an opportunity to bust through the low ceiling of expectations established in the opening scenes, but Taylor-Johnson is strictly serviceable, and so is the film. Cena is as charismatic as ever, but he spends most of the film facedown in the dust.

This is the ninth feature film directed by Liman, who broke through in the 1990s with Swingers and Go and went Hollywood with The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Edge of Tomorrow. After all this time, it’s still hard to figure out Liman’s cinematic identity, beyond a sort of controlled comic book chaos. File this one in Liman’s drawer of unexpected digressions, alongside but still superior to his Valerie Plame biopic Fair Game and the sci-fi trash heap Jumper. Liman brings a sturdy craftsmanship to The Wall, and yet I still had to check IMDB multiple times to make sure that he’s not James Mangold.