“The Wall”

*

(R, 1:30)

Not long into “The Wall,” two U.S. soldiers find themselves pinned down by sniper fire in a remote part of Iraq. One gets on the radio and screams, “Requesting extraction!” You’ll know the feeling.

This small and lazy film — featuring two actors, one evil voice and a crumbling stone wall — attempts to be deep and existential but can’t hide its flaws.

Written by first-time screenwriter Dwain Worrell, “The Wall” follows a two-man sniper team, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and WWE star John Cena, which is ambushed by an Iraqi super sniper. Only a low wall separates the two sides. A wall. Get it? That’s what fancy movie folk call symbolism.

The film becomes a cat-and-mouse game between the hiding Iraqi and Taylor-Johnson, since Cena spends most of the film unconscious.

Taylor-Johnson’s character, Sgt. Allen Isaac, is in bad shape: shot in the knee, out of water and unable to call for help. Taylor-Johnson turns in a pretty good performance, convincingly digging out a bullet from his leg, trying to MacGyver his faulty equipment and attempting to locate his tormentor by the angle of the sniper’s shots. (There’s lots of scribbling math equations in the sand.)

The Iraqi turns out to be a smarmy but chatty villain who figures out a way to communicate with Isaac through his earpiece. “I just want to have a conversation with you, Isaac,” he purrs before launching into a back-and-forth about the nature of the war and our hero’s mental state. “From where I’m sitting, you look like the terrorist.”

The sniper (voiced by Laith Nakli) wants Isaac to reveal his deepest secrets and make him understand the folly of the Iraq invasion. He quotes Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Frost, all in a British accent.

Our hero responds with pure Yankee bravado: “I’m chillin’ like a villain,” Isaac tells the Iraqi, dismissively calling him “bro” or “haji.” It’s hard to decide which nation comes off better with this pair of cringe-inducing representatives.

Director Doug Liman, who knows bold action sequences from working on “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and “The Bourne Identity,” is pinned down in a static piece of work. So little happens that the movie would easily work as a stage play.

“The Wall” borrows from other sniper films, including “Shooter,” “Enemy at the Gates” and especially “American Sniper.” In the end it’s not clear what “The Wall” is. It fails as a psychological thriller. It says nothing interesting about war. It’s too boring to be an action movie, and it’s too silly to teach anything about cultural differences.