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Sunday, September 10, 2017

9/11



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