White Wall (2010)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The acting in this movie is really good.

I often find there to be two kinds of movie watchers; those that see the bad and judge based on it, or those that see the good and enjoy it. If you are the former, do not watch this movie. If, however, you like a less than glowing movie for being more than 'enjoyably bad', keep reading.This movie is NOT 'enjoyably bad', but rather shows a growth in film production skill significant enough to surpass enjoyably bad movies in quality (not enjoyability). That is ironically this movie's downfall. While the unique story and setting may draw some critical fire, they are well done if you are willing to accept a slightly unusual post- apocalyptic stage for the story. So too is the movie's music and cinematography (its highest point). Acting, however, is flat and in a movie that visibly takes itself seriously, it makes for a notable distraction. The problem is that the acting is ALMOST passable, meaning that instead of laughing at a poorly delivered line and enjoying it for the laughs you get, you will instead just mind yourself annoyed at what could almost have been a solidly good film. The script also could have been much sharper, making the already stilted acting even stiffer.Pacing is slower than one might expect from the way the movie presents itself. For what looks to be a low budget action movie, there are remarkably few action scenes, and shots linger long enough that story feels slowed to a crawl at times. What this looses in classical attention grabbing it gains in artistic value and atmosphere (due largely to the previously mentioned gorgeous cinematography of the film). This lingering camera trades out for an odd combination of long fixed shots and short hand-held close ups during action sequences. This makes for an interesting blend that feels strange at first, but by the movie's final fight scene beautifully ties everything together into a final, brilliantly shot finale.It's hard to know what to expect from this movie. Even in classifying its genre, it tackles so much that its hard to place. It is a futuristic/modern post-apocalypse woven with elements of kung-fu, western, and film noir mystery style aspects and an oddly atmospheric meandering storyline that pretty much guarantees that this movie is NOT what you are expecting. So my final bit of advice; go in without expectations. Let this movie be what it is and try not to judge it for anything else. If acting is a major issue to you, I may recommend you skip out on this one, but if mediocre scripting and delivery won't get in the way of a decent and unusual story, good musical score, and beautiful camera-work, this movie may be worth your time.

I encountered this movie with little to no expectations as I'd never heard of it, however it was very recent so I thought I would give watching it a shot. And here I am, perhaps the closest to regretting watching a movie as I've ever been. This review is relatively specific as I feel it is necessary in order to help everyone understand just how bad this movie is.As several other reviews have pointed out, the writing and acting are simply awful. I understand that the movie had a low budget and it was meant to be more of a realization of a dream than a real "hit"... but wow. I've seen low-budget movies vastly superior to this. The setting and mood alone are incoherent and almost non-existent. Dirt is something that has no cost, yet all of the people wandering in this "post-apocalyptic" world are spotless, clean-shaven, and look like people you would see walking on the street. There appear to be no shortage in supplies, uniformed law enforcers, an in-tact hospital, even a swanky and almost perfectly functioning car. Why, then, is there a lack of guns? Did they somehow disappear from the face of the Earth? One tiny but crazy concept in the movie is that anything can be self-taught. Anyone would understand that scientific research is not something that can be "self-taught", especially if you're a janitor. Generally speaking, 90% of the time I was thinking "everyone in this movie could die and it wouldn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things". Half of the time I couldn't even tell why what I was watching was supposed to be important. Ultimately, it shows that very little to no research was done for this movie. The actors apparently had no background whatsoever in acting, as everyone was about as expressive as a brick wall. I tried to sympathize with its creators, oh how I tried. This movie was worse than Legend of Chun-Li, and anyone that has seen that movie cannot fathom the complete and utter waste of time that "White Wall" provides.

This movie is bad. The acting is bad, the script and screenplay are bad, sometimes even the cut is bad. The pace is too slow, and many scenes seem strangely out of place.For instance, the scene were our protagonist meets a policeman in some small alley, and then quickly leans towards the wall, I'm not even sure why he does what he does.. At first I thought he wanted to turn his face away from the policeman to not be recognized, but this wasn't the reason, as they look at each other just after the cop walked by. So he didn't want to hide his face. He had no freaking reason to stand there for like 30 seconds looking at his own reflection in a piece of broken glass in a window frame. After that he just walks away. And the whole thing was acted ridiculously bad.Now this was just one small scene. There are lots of scenes which just don't make any sense or don't quite "fit in".The idea of the movie as a whole is actually pretty good. Other than most reviewers I even think the fighting scenes weren't bad, I kinda enjoy "realistic" fights, even when not all fighters are good at martial arts. But still, that is not enough to give this piece of junk two stars. The rest is just too bad.A post-apocalyptic low-budget film that does everything right that this flick did wrong is the German movie "Kampfansage - Der letzte Schüler". Not sure if there is an English version. But if you wanna see a good low-budget post-apocalyptic movie, I would suggest that rather than "White Wall".I even read the directors message in the IMDb board telling us how he had to struggle to make the production of White Wall possible, and how he had to shoot most of the movie in a 3rd world country, etc. Obviously they only had 15 days to do the whole thing.But even with such massive odds, I just can't give this flick more than one star. No matter the troubles that the crew had to go through to make this indie movie possible, I'm sorry, it just disappoints completely.My message to the crew would be: Do this in a more consistent fashion, make the scenes "glue together" better, ensure that your actors bring some real emotion into it, and for gods sake, give it a faster pace and remove the strange out-of-focus crap and the pseudo-artsy strange music. Please learn from this failure, thank you.

When you think of "great" post apocalyptic films some titles that come to mind include "The Road", "Dune", "Pitch Black", the "Road Warrior" series, and of course "Planet of the Apes". I don't know where some people get off claiming this is the "Godfather of Action films" or the "greatest" post-apocalyptic film ever made. I can only formulate they had some sort of connection with the film, whether it be they were part of the cast, crew, production, or distribution of this film. I believe these people giving rave reviews of this film are frankly, well, smoking something funny and have really, REALLY, low standards for films. The film looks like it's been filmed outside of New Mexico or something. It's supposed to be a post apocalyptic background, but to me, it looks like some sort of south American city. A little grungy in places, but I don't see rats, people starving for food, etc etc. On the contrary, all the actors seem to be wearing clothes that looked like they were sporting Levi denim. The city has it's own well kept hospital, the streets have lighting, and a couple of the characters sport plate fulls of food on their kitchen table that would make many of us look poor. What's with the fancy shiny looking MG 2 door sporty car?? The acting is awful and stiff and rigid. The storyline is too slow. And there were quite a few times I could catch the camera trying to focus in and out of what is going on in the scene. Don't kid yourself, this movie is bad, really bad. Actions scenes?? Hardly, even those are bad. Almost laughable. This isn't even a "B" movie. More like an "F" movie for F as in "Fail". I don't recommend anyone going out of their way to rent or purchase this film. In fact, I don't know where you'd really do both. I was given a copy of this film, and after 2 minutes of popping it into the DVD player I knew this was going to be really bad. After giving it a chance 30 minutes in, I decided I had better things to do with my life then spend the next hour watching this disaster!!