A good ending does not equate a good movie

Rating: 4/10 (23 September 2006)

... which is bad news for The Usual Suspects, but even worse news for 9/11-take United 93 because it is a film that solely relies on its last 10 minutes to be poignant, engrossing and unfortunately even watchable. The rest is a dizzying and visually exhausting fare that besides its shaky camera-work has no even remotely interesting approaches to save it. Even this cinematic device is tiresome as it fails in bestowing its product with that "intimate" and Claustophobic feel, and it instead leaves you thinking that a monkey could have shot it  same lack of any clear sense of direction, and the same listless wandering.
This monkey (Paul Greengrass) opens his film with a scene of one of the hijackers  the one with the unibrow  sitting on his hotel bed and reading from the Koran. The next morning, he boards United 93, unites with his fellow hijackers and takes over the plane. Dizziyingly, the story shifts to command centers, traffic control towers and the National Guard who all struggle to work out the situation, shouting numbers at their screens and talking on their mobile phones. Most of the action takes place at the aforementioned stations and not the actual plane (like it should have).
So now we regrettably have 1 hour and a half long hectic, shaky journey of air traffic controllers navigating a pool of numbers, coordinates, transmissions and codewords. Relegating 9/11 to numbers on a screen of course makes this experience detached, listless and cerebral. I'm not saying there needs to be melodrama, but there needs to be some emotion  a subtle scene or two to elicit a psychological response from the audience besides boredom and exhaustion over all the shouted flight numbers.
What is disturbing is not the tragic fate of the passengers on-board United 93, but that IN SPITE of an emotionally-charged premise, controversial circumstances (very early to make a film like this) and intimate camera-work, it actually leaves you cold until the last ten minutes. In these last minutes, Greengrass finally abandons the lofty command centres and zooms in on the passengers on-board the flight  and the result is thankfully a poignant last journey.
4 out of 10