How do you do a movie about 9/11 when you don’t have the budget, crew, or special effects on hand to actually do that momentous day justice? If you’re Charlie Sheen and National Lampoon’s Cattle Call director Martin Guigui, the answer is simple: Stuff a bunch of actors in an elevator, grab some stock footage and B-roll of Whoopi Goldberg looking nervous, and stage the cinematic disaster flick equivalent of a TV bottle episode.
That appears to be what’s going on in 9/11, a movie we first told you about when Sheen was getting it off the ground last year. “Based on actual events”—No shit!—and co-starring Goldberg, Gina Gershon, and Luis Guzmán, the film looks like an attempt to make the least expensive 9/11 movie possible, boiling down one of the most life-changing events of the 21st century into a series of phone calls and arguments between people in an elevator. Which isn’t to say there’s not something vaguely admirable about Sheen and Guigui punching so far above their weight class (or an inherent tension to the idea of being trapped in an elevator in one of the World Trade Center towers), but it’s going to be a hard sell to convince audiences that this creative team has something new or insightful to say about that particular day.
9/11 arrives in theaters on September 8, because of course it does.