The Wall

The Wall is not your aver­age war movie. It’s not pop­u­lat­ed with epic bat­tles scenes. Army tanks aren’t fir­ing explo­sive charges. Sol­diers don’t tip­toe over live mine­fields. Instead we have Sar­gent Allen Isaac (Aaron Tay­lor-John­son), an injured Amer­i­can sniper strand­ed in the desert, dehy­drat­ed and with a bul­let wound to the knee.

His ene­my is Juba (Laith Nakli), an Iraqi sharp­shoot­er who taunts him through radio trans­mis­sions, demand­ing that he co-oper­ate or he’ll take anoth­er shot at Sar­gent Math­ews (John Cena), Allen’s com­rade, who lays uncon­scious in the open view. The only thing shield­ing our pro­tag­o­nist from anoth­er bul­let is a small, crum­bling wall.

There’s no doubt that the film offers an intrigu­ing set-up: a sin­gle loca­tion, two sta­tion­ary char­ac­ters with oppos­ing moti­va­tions, one of whom is pro­fuse­ly bleed­ing. The cat and mouse dynam­ic that ensues push­es the film into blend­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal, con­ver­sa­tion­al dra­ma with war movie con­ven­tions. It promis­es a plot filled with com­plex­i­ties, but Dwain Worrell’s screen­play fails to devel­op on its sharp con­cept, and it soon becomes appar­ent that this fea­ture length tale would have worked bet­ter as an episode of Homeland.

Some inter­est­ing ideas are thrown into the mix, includ­ing the ques­tion of how lin­guis­tics can be used as a form cam­ou­flage and the sug­ges­tion that both sides are ter­ror­ists in dif­fer­ent guis­es. But these thoughts are nev­er ful­ly devel­oped as the film heav­i­ly places our alliance with the white, west­ern­er Allen. The ene­my is not shown – we only hear his mock­ing voice and see his seem­ing­ly omni­scient vision through POV shots, which along­side his deceit­ful trick­ery and chill­ing chuck­les, height­en the ten­sion at moments of utmost psy­cho­log­i­cal torment.

Dis­ap­point­ing­ly, char­ac­ters do not seem to expand out­side of their sit­u­a­tion. Juba’s desire to play games fails to go fur­ther than ask­ing per­son­al ques­tions with dia­logue which, on occa­sion, sounds as if it’s been snatched from detec­tive B‑movie with lines like, ​“We’re not so dif­fer­ent you and I.” What should be a smart nego­ti­a­tion, falls into point­less con­ver­sa­tion. Allen’s refusal to tell Juba about his life means that the audi­ence are also denied infor­ma­tion. A rem­i­nis­cence of his late friend Dean, a sol­dier who died in bat­tle, as as close as the film gets to sentiment.

Despite not know­ing who our sol­dier real­ly is, the film does work in cre­at­ing an stripped back every­man rather than a war hero. He is sus­cep­ti­ble to death and the real­i­ty of his sit­u­a­tion is void of movie mir­a­cles. Doug Liman doesn’t shy away from close-ups of gush­ing fleshy wounds, and Allen remains real­is­ti­cal­ly immo­bile from his injury. Aaron Tay­lor Johnson’s deliv­ers a great per­for­mance, work­ing to uphold the nar­ra­tive which, ulti­mate­ly, sells the actor short.