Reign Over Me takes its title from a song by The Who that insinuates itself as part of the narrative whenever Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne aren't carrying the load. Adam Sandler is Charlie Fineman, an unfortunate soul who lost his wife and three daughters on one of the 9/11 planes; Don Cheadle is Alan Johnson, a dentist pal of Charlie's stuck in a perfect marriage that's driving him crazy. What these men need is a shot of Adult Contemporary Movie perspective, and in the film's "meet cute," Alan reunites with Charlie as Charlie putters by on what appears to be a street-legal motorized scooter. Because Reign Over Me isn't much of an allegory for post-9/11 New York and doesn't carry with it either a hint of politicism or, really, a complex thought in its head, it's possible to take the contrary position that it both exploits 9/11 for its own minor melodramas and doesn't because Charlie's tragedy lacks resonance. (Ultimately, the film's failure to suture is its best defense against any kind of analysis.) No question that Sandler's manic man-child/berserker persona is exploited, though, to embody post-traumatic stress disorder, which is complicated again with the confusion of whether it's the disorder being misused or Sandler himself. No matter, as Liv Tyler--looking and talking an awful lot like Jennifer Coolidge these days--materializes as the magic therapist (in place of Spike Lee's "Super-Duper Magic Negro," which Cheadle manages just barely to avoid as he did not in Brett Ratner's The Family Man), and triple-threat writer/director/actor Mike Binder can't resist the tough-, straight-talking receptionist (Paula Newsome) to inject the requisite amount of "sassy" into the vanilla proceedings.

Charlie manifests his malfunction by endlessly remodelling his kitchen and playing video games while listening to his white-guy vinyl collection; and Alan manifests his by rolling his eyes the moment his wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) suggests that it's not acceptable behaviour for a married guy with two kids to stay out all night without calling home. Good thing Charlie's there to free Alan's inner Charlie while Alan's there to rein in Charlie's outer Charlie. Meanwhile, emotional hand grenades are tossed from a safe distance to elicit audience and character responses: fathers die; flashbacks to dead kids are indulged; courtroom sequences end with sage judges (Donald Sutherland, perhaps the greatest actor of the '70s, here reduced to fourth billing behind Sandler) delivering withering speeches to accountants and lawyers; and everymom Melinda Dillon cries. Upping the ante on the misogyny sweepstakes (there are no positive women characters in Reign Over Me, not that it's really risible in any way), Saffron Burrows plays a woman severely stricken with jungle fever and a fit of the crazies, used mainly as cruel comic relief before she's used as the deus ex vagina. Shot in Hi-Def, the movie's New York looks like it might if Rob Reiner had made The Fisher King, all rounded edges and smooth atrocity--and the results seem similar, too, as Charlie gets to fly his freak flag high and, occasionally, go postal on the people who care for him for no discernible reason. Is there a moral in here about gathering rosebuds? Or the value of friends and families that keep a distance? I guess so, if you're retarded.-

THE UPSIDE OF ANGER