Too Soon!
Two Heroes Get Stoned In World Trade Center, a Deplorably Safe Sap-Fest

By Zach Stephenson

Oliver Stone has never been one to compromise vision for commercial appeal, until this wack sap-fest. His prior directorial touchstones could only surface, soberingly and cathartically with Platoon, and with sheer schizo, macabre aplomb in Natural Born Killers, on America’s once-fabled silver screens.

Such a striking eye - if fatalistic and increasingly manic - also captured the essence of peoples’ joint vulnerabilities in cinematic classics like Wall Street and a rendition of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio. These films are requisite viewing because not only do they examine the full gamut of human emotion, they issue knowing, unflinching contempt for people engulfed by instability and self-wrought insecurity. And yes, this contempt is potent enough to pop off the screen and strike the deserving audience member like a cobra.

So when we all heard Stone was directing a film based on the fall-out of 9/11, there was the anticipatory tinge of provocation in knowing that Stone would most likely follow the precedent of his former films with a brutal, near abstract concoction of shady motives and dire tribulations. The September 11 attacks are a beast that needs to be tackled with nerve, focus and genuine faith in the product. Instead, Stone has slipped his broad following a Mickey and allowed mainstream audiences to nurse on the sentimental milk that is his career’s first sacrificial and predictable blunder.

Yeah, Alexander failed as a film and at the box office (he’s never been a bread winner), but that flick proved that in his aging and hard partying frame Stone still had backbone left for critics to sharpen their knives, ones the size of toothpicks. Yet, it’s all too obvious that Stone felt the critic community’s vast pricks in his wrinkles when undertaking World Trade Center. This movie cautiously simmers our universal emotion on the still-too-present calamity stove that is September 11. This movie is vanilla bullshit and you could call it from the trailer.

Flipping through the true lives of two Port Authority police officers tragically pinned under the collapse of the first tower, the movie asks us to collectively join hands, in face of endless unanswered questions to fill multiple phone books, as well as what looks like sheer deception by the federal government. Swallow and find the teary eye of your fellow movie-loving American, and share a glimpse of soul searching and deep meaning.

The film’s melodrama is circulated via mundane flashbacks and glimpses into the dashed hopes of frantic relatives. But these scenes only offer a peripheral vista of predictable response – the same fog that has left us all dumbfounded over the last five years – while painfully avoiding an inhale-and-dive into the fiery, politico-fueled, lively crevices that once defined Stone’s work.

World Trade Center is notably the first Stone film to have protagonists who clearly lack faults. Ironically, while trapped under the rubble, no light is shed on Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña). Their dialogue rarely deviates beyond the trivialities of their children’s names and a mutual admiration for Starsky and Hutch. Toss in a pompous, revenge-seething marine – the character targeted in the film’s mostly positive reviews/gulps - Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) who comes to mythically rescue these heroes. And it’s a wrap.

Too soon!

A half-arsed grab to gain a second wind by riding sentimentality, it only seems natural that the film was scheduled beside the teeny-dance-bop of Step Up (United 93 was released along-side Stick It). Audiences ditched their kids at the Step Up matinee to the tune of 20.7 million dollars for this, the following workweek’s water cooler chitchat.

It’s ironic that Maggie Gyllenhaal was almost cut loose from her role as Will Jimeno’s wife for publicly quoting, "America is responsible in some way" [for the 9/11 attacks]. Circling conspiracy theories was formerly one of Stone’s preferred inflammatory devices, and unfortunately he’s been stoned as somewhat of a nutso by the mainstream press, and thus we get this.

World Trade Center smells more Mel Gibson than Oliver Stone from the get-go. Its mannerisms feel appropriately squared for a hyped profile on the Trinity Broadcast Network, and thus, we have two great directors (the other being United 93‘s Paul Greengrass) this year who pussied out when taking on the most definitive and controversial historical event since Pearl Harbor. From all of that event’s chaos we basically have a boring day leading into a hijacking and two dusty average Joes clinching to hope. If filmgoers needed inspiration to keep going, they’d stare at a crucifix. The fact remains there won’t be another movie in some time that will stimulate the public’s confused minds by taking on 9/11 besides a “crazy” documentary like Loose Change.

When a Hollywood veteran like Stone buys into the red-white-and-blue elephant shit, it’s an extremely discouraging realization. The next Oliver Stone is needed now because this one is so powdered out and tired he’s systematically Hallmark.