The Wall (2017)
Directed by Doug Liman
An American sniper and his spotter engage in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with an Iraqi sniper.
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It’s also a single-person, single-location gimmick movie along the lines of Colin Farrell’s “Phone Booth,” Ryan Reynolds’ “Buried” and Blake Lively’s “The Shallows.”
With its single-location, practically real-time idea of a one-on-one confrontation between two snipers, “The Wall” belongs to a select pool of tête-à-tête thrillers — “Phone Booth,” “Buried,” “Sleuth” — in which our hero discovers he’s the mouse being hunted by a sly cat and must use his wits if he hopes to survive.
It’s been the better part of a decade since “Buried,” “Devil,” and “Frozen” (the one about flesh-eating wolves, not the one about princesses) all hit theaters in the same year, and, for a moment there, it almost seemed as though the sub-genre those films share had started to lose its appeal.
Not only is it about brotherhood and friendship among snipers, but it presents itself as an isolated single-location horror in the vein of Buried.
Hiding places are scarce, mouths are dry and muzzle flashes represent the only radar advantage – not exactly Black Hawk Down, but more an open-world Buried.
Ryan Reynolds in "Buried"…
Joel Schumacher's "Phone Booth" is a distant precedent for it but the two most direct and terrific descendants are Rodrigo Cortes' amazing "Buried" starring Ryan Reynolds and Steven Knight's "Locke" starring Tom Hardy.
Liman's film is minimalist, claustrophobic and highly visceral, in the same tradition as one-location thrillers like "127 Hours," "Buried," "Phone Booth," "Locke," "Cube," "Tape," "All Is Lost," "Cube," and "Saw."
Essentially a two-hander between Taylor-Johnson and the disembodied voice of his adversary (played by Laith Nakli), what follows is a solid example of the sort of single-location thriller – Locke, Buried, Phone Booth – that often ends up being more intriguing as a concept than a movie.
Filmed in a single location and unfolding in real time, not unlike “Buried” or “Locke,” “The Wall” follows Allan Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Shane Matthews (John Cena), a spotter and his staff sergeant, scanning the hot desert terrain, searching for their purpose after President George W. Bush prematurely hung the “Mission Accomplished” banner for all the world to see.
This compact little action picture has a few things in common with American Sniper and Lone Survivor, but more so with Phone Booth and Locke – a grim story squeezed into a tight space, featuring a cast of mostly one.
Compact, blunt and borderline exploitative, Doug Liman’s lean military thriller The Wall largely plays like a Max Fischer stage adaptation of American Sniper.
Before Clint Eastwood took over the project, "American Sniper" was being developed by Steven Spielberg , who ultimately passed on it because he couldn't figure out a way, budgetarily, to create and follow a parallel storyline dealing with an Iraqi counterpart to the real-life sniper played by Bradley Cooper .
“The Wall” will inevitably be compared with Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper,” but it’s obviously a much more concentrated piece, without the expansiveness of that film, and has a very different emotional core.
This compact little action picture has a few things in common with American Sniper and Lone Survivor, but more so with Phone Booth and Locke – a grim story squeezed into a tight space, featuring a cast of mostly one.
Extra points for avoiding the flag-waving heroics of American Sniper .
It therefore lacks historical and ideological validity in much the same way that the absence of historical and ideological context affected “American Sniper,” the better 2014 movie directed by Clint Eastwood, about the real-life sniper who killed more Iraqis than any other.
Cinematography is by Roman Vasyanov and echoes his gritty and atmospheric war lensing in Brad Pitt’s riveting “Fury.”