‘The Wall’ is a high-tension, suspenseful psychological thriller featuring a superb performance from Aaron Taylor-Johnson and a plot as flimsy as the wall he hides behind.
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‘The Wall’ is a high-tension, suspenseful psychological thriller featuring a superb performance from Aaron Taylor-Johnson and a plot as flimsy as the wall he hides behind.
The central tension of the film is a commonly used one: a protagonist placed in an extreme situation where he is a hair’s breadth away from death and has to fight for his life. However, ‘The Wall’ is different from many other movies in that it reduces everything to the bare minimum, from the compressed 90-minute running length to a setting consisting of a war-damaged brick wall on a desert and not much else.
Despite being a war film, ‘The Wall’ doesn’t have many combat action scenes. It is, instead, more of a psychological warfare between Ize, a US army soldier played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and a faceless Iraqi sniper represented by the disembodied voice on Ize’s radio. With a gunshot wound in his knee, Ize has to hide behind the wall from the mysterious sniper who seems to outgun him both in strength and wit.
The bulk of the film revolves around the conversation between Ize and the sniper via radio. Keeping up the conversation is as much about buying time and prying information out of the enemy as it is an ultimate psychological test for Ize, whose physical body is already pushed to its limit what’s with the gunshot wound as well as the harsh conditions in the desert. However, the film’s reliance on this radio conversation reveals how weak the plot is because it is ultimately a convenient plot device. The radio connection is up or down depending on the need of the plot. The wall shields Ize from bullets throughout the film but easily falls down with a push from a physically debilitated man.
Despite the already compressed length of the script, the film still drags on at certain points when the Iraqi sniper gets a little too chatty. It’s all part of the game they’re playing, sure, but all that talking gets tiring after a while. Do we really need to listen to him drone on about Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe? If it is an effort on the part of the screenwriter to make the antagonist more interesting, it doesn’t quite work. Sure, it subverts the stereotype and shows that sniper can be highly educated, too. But the bit of information feels so out of place and almost irrelevant considering the situation. So too is the revelation about Ize’s inner angst towards the end of the film, which adds nothing to the main conflict.
Ultimately, ‘The Wall’ is a one-man show, so it is no surprise that the saving grace of the film comes from Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who delivers a superb performance as a soldier cornered and outgunned by his enemy.
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