When it was announced that Oliver Stone was shooting a film about Sept. 11, there was great gnawing and gnashing of teeth among the right wing. How could an infamous leftist, particularly one who spins Kennedy conspiracy tales and turns America's smack-craving for violence into a live-action cartoon, possibly capture our national tragedy?

It's difficult to describe just how howlingly bad Stone's film is and how much of it is in bad taste. A day that shall live in infamy has been transformed into a feel-good melodrama complete with a sap-dripping conclusion. It is Hollywood at its mawkish apex.

The story is based on the experience of two Port Authority policemen, John McLouglin and Will Jimeno, who found themselves trapped under the collapsing towers. Badly injured and lost to the shocked world above, they keep each other's spirits up while waiting, desperately, for rescue. Away from downtown, the McLaughlin and Jimeno families gather to support each other. The situation looks unbearably grim, but they have no recourse but to hope.

The first part of the film leading up to the collapse of the towers is well-structured, with special effects meticulously recreating the unfolding chaos that day in lower Manhattan. When McLaughlin (Nicolas Cage) and his team, including Jimeno (Michael Pena), enter the first tower, they have no plan. Information is so patchy that they don't even know the second tower has been hit.

Awakening under tons of rubble, the two cops trade personal stories and encouragement while occasionally yelling into the void for help. Their wives (Maria Bello as Donna McLaughlin and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Allison Jimeno) are, in their way, also yelling into the void. They are glued to their television screens one moment, running as far as possible from the silence on their husbands' fate.

Everyone was affected by the day. In case we failed to appreciate this, Stone gives us a dateline in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where a cop eating his requisite doughnut reacts with outrage. Closer to New York, Dave Kares (Michael Shannon), an office worker, slips on his old Marine Corps uniform and heads off into the inferno, stopping for his pastor's blessing at a Thomas Kincaid–fabricated church, where a bible on the altar is helpfully turned to the Book of Revelation.

It was here that the Czech audience laughed. It doesn't help that Kares seems to be a dead-eyed automaton, as frightening as Marjoe Gortner's crazy National Guardist in Earthquake, a film whose character analysis rivals Stone's.

Jimeno will also have a brush with the divine, when the bleeding-hearted Savior appears carrying some Highland Springs bottled water for the trapped pair. Jesus, in fact, appears twice in the proceedings, though it is his earthly representative, Kares, who will save the pair.

It all ends at a picnic, with Cage uttering a superfluous voice-over in case we missed the day in reality or have slept through the past two hours: "9/11 showed us what humans are capable of. The evil, yeah sure, but it also brought out a goodness we forget could exist."