Overlong and slowly paced, writer-director Mike Binder's drama proves only that Adam Sandler can act without mugging and that Don Cheadle can make even a dentist seem interesting.
The rest of this post-9/11 saga buries itself in self-pity, neuroses and a dull treatise about eternal friendship.
Sandler is Charlie, who has lost his entire family and whose grief is such that he has become virtually catatonic.
He bursts into rages over nothing and then turns on a childish kind of charm. Cheadle is his dentist friend, a former college room-mate, who finds him in the street and tries to gain his confidence.
The dentist, however, has troubles of his own, notably Saffron Burrows as a troubled client who offers him a blowjob once her teeth have been fixed, and then sues him when he tells her to get out.
His wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) is not at all amused. Meanwhile a therapist (Liv Tyler) tries to deal with Charlie and finds him so sealed in his grief that the job is almost impossible.
All the performances are able but Reign Over Me is pretentious about the effect of 9/11 on America.
Reign Over Me
Cert: 15
