A shoddy movie in poor taste. The victims
of 9/11 deserve a great deal better. (Review by Patrick Compton - 3/10)
In one of the more cynical exercises in
Hollywood history, this tawdry, cheap-budget affair has been released to
coincide with the 16th anniversary of the Islamic terror attack on the Twin
Towers in New York.
The film, which has been adapted from
Patrick Carson’s play Elevator, has
been written and directed by Martin Guigui whose claim to fame rests on
National Lampoon’s Cattle Call. That tells you a great deal about what many
people, particularly the families of the victims, will regard as an insult to
their memory.
It doesn’t help that the movie’s main star,
Charlie Sheen (Two and a Half Men),
is a celebrity “truther”, someone who believes the attack was a government
inside-job rather than a genuine terror assault.
Sheen plays a rich businessman who is in
the process of being divorced by his wife (Gina Gershon). After the meeting
with their lawyers in the North Tower, they are trapped in a lift when the
first aircraft strikes the building.
Most of the film focuses on their banal
interactions with three other people in the lift while bedlam reigns outside.
The movie has cheapo production values, a
superficial script and some less than committed acting. It’s hard to know why
Whoopi Goldberg signed on for her cameo as an elevator controller. Like most of
her colleagues, who include Luis Guzman, Galen Walker and Jacqueline Bisset,
the script requires little more than a dialled-in performance.
The movie pretends to show Americans
working out their differences in the face of terror, but in reality it’s little
more than a dull, cliché-ridden re-working of disaster movies like Towering Inferno.
This is a shoddy movie in poor taste. The
victims of 9/11 deserve a great deal better.
9/11 opened in Durban on September 8, 2017. – Patrick Compton
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