THE WALL review

It’s a difficult thing to make a feature-length movie that takes place in one location and with few characters interesting. Most concepts that involve very few things going on can last for longer than 20 minutes. It might make a good YouTube video. But making it feel worthwhile to pay $12+ to watch 2 people interact with each other for 80+ minutes is hard. THE WALL, for the most part, does it pretty well. Think of it as a blend of PHONE BOOTH and BURIED. Quality definitely leads much more on the BURIED side.

THE WALL is about a sniper team played by John Cena, the sniper, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the spotter, who get called to investigate a distress call about a possible sniper in 2007 Iraq. Then things go sour. I mean, it wouldn’t really be a movie if something bad doesn’t happen. And without giving too much away, we spend the majority of our time with Aaron Taylor-Johnson as he tries to survive and get him and his buddy out before they both bleed out. Only problem is he’s stuck behind a wall and can’t move very well.

What really intrigues me is how a director approaches these small-scale movies. Doug Liman is known for pretty decent action films. He’s done THE BOURNE IDENTITY, MR. AND MRS. SMITH, and one of my personal favorites, EDGE OF TOMORROW. He’s not only good with action, but he’s smart. He knows how to handle characters and situations to make them likable and believable. This is something Liman would be great at…

For the most part, yes, he handles it incredibly well. But before I get about what works about this movie, I want to get what I didn’t like out of the way. I feel there’s a missed opportunity with the examination of the politics of the situation. We’re still going on with needless wars and having this set in Iraq AFTER President Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech, yet still having soldiers on the ground would have been great to examine why we remain in these places after we supposedly won. This is glossed over a little bit, but it really doesn’t hold much significance for anything. Aside from that, I mostly appreciate Liman holding back on his style, but the movie does get visually bland at times. There’s much more going on in THE WALL than there is in BURIED, but the latter does so much more visually with its limited space that sometimes THE WALL just seems kind of lazy.

I do greatly appreciate the narrowed scope of the film. With so many movies trying to go big and bold it’s nice to see things taken down several notches to something simple. There’s just enough in the beginning to feel like these two characters are good buddies and the banter between them is fun. I really wanted them to make it out alive. So when things start to get going I was tense the entire time. They get hurt. It’s much more personal and therefore more involving than something like TRANSFORMERS which is just way too big and loud to even care. And it’s also established very early on that there’s real danger. Something like TRANSFORMERS (again) really never makes it feel like the main characters are ever in real danger and so I don’t care.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the film is something I don’t really want to talk about because it is a spoiler. It’s a great way to make the film more interesting and entertaining and creates opportunities to explore the more political and emotional side of war. But it glances over these opportunities and mainly just serves to show us that surviving in a battle situation is HARD. And even though the decision with the ending is questionable -- it definitely made a few people in the theatre scoff in disappointment -- I still walked out liking the film. I probably won’t watch it again. But it’s worth seeing. Maybe go for the discount Tuesday.

6.75/10

Review also available here!