very TV-movie-ish, but still worth watching ...

Rating: 6/10 (4 October 2006)

"Oliver Stone has made a comeback," that's what one critic ranted about shortly after the release of this film in a review. Gone were the thousands of quick cuts and the multiple uses of film stock (although there is the use of actual footage in some scenes); or his trademark overuse of the same talent (John C. McGinley, Michael Wincott, Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore). This was actually a film that could of been done by any director-for-hire, but Stone also used one of his other trademarks and that was to cast Hollywood heavyweight and rising actors like Nicholas Cage, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena and Jay Hernandez. And that is what distinguished itself from the other 9/11 movie out this year, "Flight 93." The result of this endeavor was a fair film that only captured the story of two trapped PAPD officers and their families on that infamous day of U.S. history since Pearl Harbor. Stone did not use any gratuitous violence and instead kept it taut and tasteful. It makes me wonder if there were constraints on Stone from the financiers and studio with just how much of the film he could add his personal touches to, and if he received some "parental guidance" in this one (like Stanley Kubrick so desperately needed at times). Because this film does not seem or scream a typical Oliver Stone film.
And because of the concentration on only two characters and their families in the story, that was one of the reasons why this film felt very much like a movie-of-the-week. It also did not feel as significant of an event such as 9/11 at times, and instead seemed more like another disaster film at times due to the extreme close-ups with Cage and Pena trapped in the rubble of the Twin Towers. The film ends on a happier and hopeful note (which again, is taboo for Oliver Stone), but at the same time the viewer feels as if the lives of the others are dismissed as if it were an Irwin Allen-produced disaster movie of the seventies, and only the immediate survivors show any importance. Only at the closing credits are the deceased and those missing on September 11, 2001 acknowledged.
One of my biggest complaints with this picture was that Stone did not use a bigger scope in terms of storytelling as he did with films like "Any Given Sunday" and "Nixon." Perhaps Mr. Stone is not fit to do mainstream or tame films. I just hope that he does not think he should do a comedy based on the strength of this film's success.