'United 93' evokes terror of attacks

Peter Hermann and Masato Kamo in "United 93."

PLOT: A cinema-verite documentary-style depiction of the events on Sept. 11, 2001, that led a planeload of passengers to fight back against the hijackers.

Let's say you could make up a "verboten list" for the first Hollywood movie about 9/11. By process of elimination, you just might just come up with something like United 93.

To wit: No jaw-thrusting heroics against swelling strings, no movie stars whose offscreen lovelife competes with the movie, no backstories where doomed passengers happily kiss their kids goodbye. No pandering. No schmaltz.

In short, United 93 is the 9/11 movie to see if you're ready to see a 9/11 movie. Of course that's a very big "if."

It may be that United 93 is as doomed as its subject -- the flight whose passengers fought back and averted the destruction of the Capitol Building. Lord knows, I found it hard to watch and couldn't honestly say I'd pay to repeat the experience.

But Brit director Paul Greengrass is to be commended for presenting the events as humanely and scrupulously as he does. The cast is a mix of real airline crew and control-tower employees who were on duty during the Sept. 11 tragedy with little-known pros (like SCTV bit player David Rasche and Denny Dillon of the cable sitcom Dream On). Their combined delivery is so "non-actory," and the camera work so on-the-fly, you'd think there just happened to be cameras in the room in various control/command centres and onboard the plane.

Greengrass' movie, based in large part on the 9/11 Commission Report, is an odd experience. Watching it, you feel the opposite of suspense, something like impatience tinged with anger. This is particularly true when you see the reactions of controllers and civil aviation officials as the horror occurred. Air traffickers joke around as the word "hijack" circulates about the room -- there hadn't been one in years, and suicide hijacking wasn't even a concept. As events move along, we discover that the various levels of civil authority didn't play well: The FAA wouldn't grant air clearance to military jets, for example, and everyone waited forever for the President to act.

The snapshot we get is that not only should United 93 not have had any chance of hitting Washington, it should not even have got off the ground (it took off 40 minutes late). For that matter, American Airlines flight 100 should never have reached the Pentagon. Conversely, who knows if the Capitol might not have survived had FAA official Ben Sliney (who plays himself) not overstepped his authority and shut down air traffic across the country over the objections of virtually everybody.

The irony of United 93 is that relatively little of it takes place on the flight.

The part that matters is the last 10 minutes, in which the passengers find out about the World Trade Center hits via cellphone, assess the slit throats of their pilots and fellow passengers and face the grim reality that these hijackers plan to die. Again, the acting is non-actory - particularly David Allan Basche as Todd Beamer, whose "Let's roll" is less battle-cry than impatient mutter and prelude to desperate chaos.

There will be some whose reason to watch will be in that last scene, wherein hijackers get beaten bloody and eyes get gouged.

Revenge is served cold in United 93, to a clinical degree.

BOTTOM LINE: Scrupulously made with virtually no Hollywood pandering or schmaltz, and almost flawless in its verite approach, this is the 9/11 movie to see if you're ready to see a 9/11 movie. Of course that's a big "if."

(This film is rated 14-A)