World Trade Center

Nicolas Cage stars but it's the women who steal the show.

Herald rating: * *

On September 11, 2001, reality monstrously out-Hollywooded Hollywood. It was like every Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger action film distilled into a few hours, only the hero didn't foil the villain and the movies were always going to have their work cut out getting to grips with it.

If Paul Greengrass' United 93 is an unsensationalist docudrama, here is its opposite - a sentimental uplifting take on the story, predictably embraced by conservative America and the White House. That's odd for Oliver Stone, a film-maker fond of subtexts, particularly when they are conspiracy theories. This take on events is really a paean to the family, torn straight from the pages of Reader's Digest. With the exception of an end title that, shamefully, sustains the entirely fictitious connection between September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, it steers clear of politics altogether.

Cage and Pea play Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno buried neck-deep in rubble when the towers pancake and the screenplay, by first-timer Andrea Berloff, skips back and forth between them and their anxious families.

The film is at its strongest in the first half hour, which abounds in chillingly authentic moments: the shadow of a low-flying aircraft passing, like an angel of death, across the sunlit street; the confused uncertainty of the young cops comprehending the unimaginable. The larger disaster occurs mostly off-screen and, apart from an ill-judged, superfluous shot of a falling body, we read most of the horror in the upturned faces.

The heart of the film belongs to its women. As Donna McLoughlin, the versatile Bello is gifted with a face that already exudes both sadness and stoic decency and some of her lines ("I don't even remember the last thing I said to John") have a piercing verisimilitude.

The always reliable Gyllenhaal, as the pregnant Allison Jimeno, is likewise impressive, a skittish presence whose optimism is always a dangerously thin veneer. But these two are not, in the end, enough to save a movie that's dull, plodding and extremely conventional. Only in the deeply weird character of Dave Karnes (Shannon), a Bible-bashing ex-Marine who suits-up and arrives at Ground Zero do we glimpse something of the oddball Stone. Karnes has the film's silliest line ("God made a curtain with the smoke, shielding us from what we are not ready to see") but also its best one. When he introduces himself to a firefighter as "Staff Sergeant David Karnes", he's asked whether he has a shorter name. He looks puzzled for a second and then says "Staff Sergeant".

Verdict: The normally unsubtle Stone makes a deeply conservative, plodding and literal film about two cops caught in the rubble, and the families who wait above ground

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Michael Pea, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Michael Shannon
Director: Oliver Stone
Running time: 129 minutes
Rating: M, low-level offensive language
Screening: Everywhere