Weak apology for 'JFK'

Rating: 3/10 (21 August 2006)

It's dramatic when anyone is trapped somewhere, injured and thirsty, and then rescued from slow death in the nick of time by a determined emergency team.
And man, does this film know that.
'World Trade Center' is not about 9/11 per se. The terrible events of that fateful day provide merely the backdrop for a buried-alive tale of looming death and serendipitous rescue. But it does so almost half-heartedly, like someone telling you a joke with a punch-line he knows will disappoint.
We follow the fortunes in this film of two Port Authority beat cops as they get called to the towers that terrible morning, get confused, and then get buried alive in the twisted wreckage of the collapsed skyscrapers.
Bless the two real-life heroes whose true story inspired this film. These dudes put their lives on the line to save others. I just wish their story had found its way into a better movie.
Michael Pena and Nicholas Cage authentically play the two buried cops and some of their interplay works. But most of the dialogue throughout the film bores us so utterly it seems to curdle as it leaves the actors' very lips. The plot unfolds like a made-for-TV movie replete with dippy scenes of angst and hand-wringing amongst family-members. We meet them AS they come unglued instead of BEFORE they come unglued and then watch dumbly as the holes are filled in with clunky flashback scenes sopping wet with sentiment.
Zzz.
In an odd little sub-plot that seems like something right out of a recruitment film, the true story of USMC David Karnes is portrayed. Inspired back to active duty by the terror of that day, Karnes suits up, heads to New York, and finds the buried cops almost single-handedly. And if true, bravo indeed. But in the obligatory epilogue, we learn Karnes proceeds to serve two tours of duty in Iraq. Bless all our fighting men, of course, but whatever your politics, watching an Oliver Stone film in which the connection between 9/11 and Iraq goes completely unexamined was unusual to say the least.
In 'World Trade Center,' a director who's had a lot to say about recent history and what his generation called "the establishment," we seem to get a film that smacks of a highly public apology to the American mainstream for dumping so much doubt at its doorstep for so long.
As amusing as it is to watch my parents' Boomer generation tacitly apologize to their parents' Greatest generation for being so naughty, this disaffected Gen-Xer would have preferred blowing his 9 bucks on a decent movie.
This movie review by Erik Gloor