Looking on the bright side of 9/11: the fact-based story of two Port Authority policemen (Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, roughly four hundred closeups between them) who, together with a couple of unluckier comrades, dauntlessly entered Tower One with the intention to help evacuate it, and survived the collapse of it on top of them. This feel-good approach seems a particularly unexpected one, a particularly cautious and safe one, to be taken by Oliver Stone, professional boat-rocker and wave-maker, who for once is not looking to cast an accusation or an aspersion (i.e., a stone), but rather to recast himself as the champion of Men in Uniform he became so briefly and incongruously with Platoon. Needless to say, there is no counterpart here to the James Jonesian abuse-of-authority figure played by Tom Berenger. The freshness of the event -- five years as against the more than dozen years between the Vietnam War and Stone's version of it -- would appear to have cowed him into his best behavior, both civically and cinematically, toning down his camerawork and his cutting along with his bellow. At bottom, this is little more than a grade-A docudrama -- a made-for-TV movie bulked up for the big screen -- with a smooth incorporation of familiar archive footage, a decent selection of re-created detail (the shower of paper, etc.), and a meticulous reproduction of the skeletal remains at Ground Zero, a cremated behemoth. The early unfolding of events, beginning at 3:29 on the morning of the 11th, can hardly help but raise a few goosebumps, as it builds an unbearable tension between the filmmaker's foot-dragging pace and the viewer's racing memory, a true collaboration between artist and audience. But that comes to an abrupt stop with the fall of the first tower, and the cementing of a static situation, half an hour into the film. The remaining hour and a half of waiting and worrying with the families (Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal as the wives), and of suffering and sweating with the immobilized men (calling to mind the forgotten Ladder 49, that post-9/11 tribute to firefighters everywhere, elsewhere, especially Baltimore), are incalculably more tension-free, more routine, more trite, more mawkish, more TV-ish. Soft Stone, if you will. You might be surprised how much you miss the hard one. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd