Doug Liman’s new sniper thriller The Wall faces a major marketing problem right out of the gate: How do you get audiences to come see The Wall when something called The Great Wall is waiting right around the corner? How do you convince movie-goers that your Wall, great or not, is still perfectly good?
The answer, apparently, is to take John Cena and Kick-Ass’ Aaron Taylor-Johnson, toss them in the desert, and trap them in a tense face-off that feels a little bit like “Phone Booth In Iraq.” Per the trailer released today by Amazon Studios, the film stars Taylor-Johnson and Cena as a U.S. spotter-sniper team, lured into a trap by an enemy sniper with total control over their desperate situation. Based off a Black List script from newcomer Dwain Worrell, the trailer is pretty much just Cena and Taylor-Johnson yelling at each other and the unseen, malevolent voice that’s hijacked their radios and shot them in the gut, but it does promise a lot of cat-and-mouse taunting, subtle scheming, and shots of Cena face-down in the dirt. The Wall busts its way into theaters in March of 2017.