‘9/11’ Review: Charlie Sheen Drama Avoids Exploitation If Not Familiarity

Some might complain that “9/11” reduces the events of September 11, 2001, to just another disaster movie, but that’s actually one of its strengths: this isn’t a film that tries to parse the big, awful picture of what happened that day, or the geopolitics that led to it or the worldwide reverberations it caused. By focusing on a small group of people trapped somewhere they shouldn’t be, the film can, at least intermittently, succeed as a human-sized drama.

In fact, titling the movie “Elevator” — the name of Patrick Carson’s original play, adapted here by Steven James Golebiowski and director Martin Guigui — might have relieved the film’s implied burden of telling such an immense story, even if its nomenclature would have been much less marketable.