The Wall

Compact, blunt and borderline exploitative, Doug Liman’s lean military thriller The Wall largely plays like a Max Fischer stage adaptation of American Sniper. 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 security workers. 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. At a fat-free, mostly real-time 81 minutes, The Wall never becomes boring—it’s the sort of punchy, self-contained, midsized genre picture that they truly don’t make anymore. With a more dynamic actor in the lead role, The Wall might have even 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. D.B.