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When Oliver Stone announced that he was making a film about 9/11, movie pundits predicted a paranoid conspiracy epic in the vein of JFK. Nothing could be further from the truth. World Trade Center, the story of two port authority cops (Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña) trapped in the rubble of the twin towers is sombre, personal, patriotic, and respectful of its subject almost to the point of tedium.

Stone's film ignores the wider context of the 9/11 attacks to focus on the simpler theme of human bravery. As Cage's withdrawn, efficient cop puts it: "9/11 showed the world what people are capable of." Both good and bad. Following a brief, scene-setting introduction, World Trade Center throws the audience squarely into the confusion and terror of the rescue effort. We don't see the towers coming down so much as experience it from beneath. And from that point we spend most of our time beneath the rubble with our immobilised cops, jumping away briefly to examine the anguish of their families.

"INTENSELY EARNEST"

The acting, inevitably, is superb. Cage, denied his usual kinetic excess by a pile of concrete, is a dignified presence, Peña is terrific and there's raw, engaging support from Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal as their wives. World Trade Center is a polar opposite to the nerve-jangling leanness of Paul Greengrass's United 93. It's a stodgy, sappy, intensely earnest film marinaded in the fuzzy morality of the Hollywood mainstream. Despite being true, it feels fictional: a distillation of human values rather than an objective chronicle. That's not necessarily a bad thing; to tell the truth, it's rather comforting.