The Wall

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. No such luck. Alas, we are still living in the golden age of single-location thrillers, even if most of them are bronze-level at best. If anything, Doug Liman’s passably entertaining new film suggests that we should brace ourselves for more such contained and claustrophobic exercises in suspense, whether we like them or not.

Arriving in theaters just a few weeks after the similarly scaled “Mine” was buried on VOD, “The Wall” may not be well-structured, but Liman’s latest still serves as an imposing reminder that — as movies get riskier to make and the gulf between blockbusters and micro-budget indies grows wider every weekend — filmmakers and financiers alike can’t be expected to resist the allure of a story format that allows them to get so much bang for their buck. Not when all you need to make a movie is two guys, a gun, and a WWE superstar.

Not that “The Wall” provides an abundance of either. The premise is, naturally, a model of simplicity. The year is 2007, and while President Bush may have declared victory in Iraq, a number of U.S. soldiers have stuck around to help clean up the mess that our army left behind. It’s unclear if the troops were given the option of going home, but Sergeant Allen Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) certainly has his reasons for wanting to stay put and sort through the rubble.