Battle of the minds

Had Alfred Hitchcock made a genre-busting war movie, it might have looked like The Wall. In the film, the camera never leaves an acre of sand broiling under the Middle Eastern sun and lost in horizon-to-horizon barrenness. Director Doug Liman, who produced The Bourne Identity, nudges his one-act drama forward through minute twists. The story fixes on a solitary soldier’s struggle to survive a hidden enemy’s psychological and martial assault.

The Wall, set during the Iraq War, takes place in late 2007. The action plays out in real time, encompassing just part of a day. At the setting’s center, several American contractors lie dead, their bodies sprawled around shot-up military vehicles and an unfinished section of elevated pipeline. Hundreds of yards away in one direction rises a hill of scrap metal and other debris, flanked by small construction sheds. In the opposite direction a wall of mud and stone, no more than 5 feet high and 30 feet long, stands ready to crumble.

A dreaded Iraqi sniper by name of Juba (voiced by Laith Nakli), hiding somewhere in the vicinity of the debris mound and sheds, and unseen throughout The Wall, shoots two American servicemen—themselves snipers—who are investigating the slaying of the contractors. For most of the film, Matthews (John Cena) lies facedown and unconscious, an easy target for Juba in front of the wall. Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) finds cover behind the wall, where he crouches in agony, his right knee obliterated by a large-caliber projectile from Juba’s rifle. Out of water and bleeding to death, Isaac can do little from his position.

Worse still, Juba has commandeered all communications. Threatening to “blow Matthews’ face off,” the Iraqi sniper coerces Isaac into a personal dialogue transmitted over the radio. Reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound character in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Isaac, nearly immobile, peers into his scope through a hole in the wall, trying to locate his foe and piece the puzzle together. The Wall pits Juba’s manipulations against Isaac’s resourcefulness.

Taylor-Johnson sustains the movie’s long takes and close-ups with grit and emotion. To his credit, Liman doesn’t disrupt the tension with gimmicky flashbacks. The film’s only real drawback is its cluster bomb of expletives that, with some war violence, earn The Wall an R rating. But if there’s an upside to the foul language, it’s the near absence of misuses of the Lord’s name.

War is hell, but many a war movie isn’t. Films in the war-movie genre tend to gratify viewers with an outcome that redeems or at least overshadows the carnage. The Wall, however, maintains from start to bitter end that war doesn’t lead to paradise.