Meat and potatoes from Ollie

Rating: 8/10 (14 August 2006)

Its a no-frills, pretty much cut-and-dried re-enactment of a really horrible day in everyone's life. Considering that it came from Oliver Stone..well, you'd never know it if it didn't say so in the end credits.
I saw it Friday night in a theater that can be measured in yards from the WTC site. That might be like going to Philadelphia to see "Rocky" or going to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to see "Titanic", but it just ended up that way.
Two Port Authority police officers go to work that day, and end up in hell. That's pretty much it. So do their families and their co-workers, but of course its a different kind of hell.
Cage and Pena do most of their acting with their faces and, more specifically, their eyes, since they are pinned down for a majority of the movie. The wives get the bigger emotional scenes, since they have no idea what's going on, if they were even down there when it all happened, etc. Maggie is very good at conveying the frustration she's feeling, and she's pregnant, too. She has a good scene in a CVS pharmacy - she doesn't even know why she's there. Bello's at her best when she meets the mother of an elevator operator at the hospital near the end. Its a very powerful scene between two very good actresses. I wouldn't have mind knowing what happened to the woman's son.
The most emotional part of the movie was the footage of the day, most of which I hadn't scene since it all happened almost five years ago. It kind of overwhelms everything else, but reality has a tendency to do that. For the first time since smoking was banned in movie theaters, I was dying to light one up.
It was good to see Patti D'Arbanville, a favorite of mine, and Michael Shannon..the guy who hid under a desk in "Pearl Harbor" as the **** hit the fan; here his character takes the exact opposite response to a tragedy, as a military man who goes to Ground Zero and finds the guys when no one else is even looking. Shannon gives the movies best performance. Also aboard are Frank Whaley, who worked w/Stone in "Born on the Fourth of July", Danny Nucci from "Titanic", Stephen Dorff and Jesus Christ.
To get political for a moment, and the movie does it for about that long, too..Shannons character says something about 'this being avenged'..and he's a military man..when will that happen? When do the victims families get some answers, or better still, some closure? These questions are not answered here, but at least they are posed. 8/10.