Chicago Sun Says That "The Path to 9/11" is worse than, well, just about every other TV movie ever made

And that's not sayin' much. Here goes (and, by the way, the review's so bad that it's bad before the review even starts!!!):

Critic's rating: Zero stars

I once sat in a car forever waiting for my mom to come out of a grocery store. I thought that was the definition of "interminable." I had no idea "The Path to 9/11" was in my future.

This is what happens during 4 1/2 lonnnng hours of "Path." Terrorists talk about killing Americans for Allah. FBI and other security officials try to track them but fail. 9/11 happens.

You don't say.

This is the most anticlimactic, tension-free movie in the history of terrorist TV.

It's hard to fathom a brouhaha brewed over such a bore. ABC has received tens of thousands of letters -- including one from Bill Clinton's office -- insisting "Path" is wildly inaccurate and should not air. But ABC still plans to air the two-part movie.

Controversy could boost viewership, except "Path" is the dullest, worst-shot TV movie since ABC's disastrous "Ten Commandments" remake. It substitutes shaky handheld cameras and dumb dialogue for craftsmanship. It could not be more amateurish or poorly constructed unless someone had forgotten to light the sets.

An appalling secondary concern is the tone makes almost every pre-9/11 American look like a fool.

Look, there's a security guard yawning while terrorists plant the 1993 bomb at the World Trade Center. How dare a security guard work while tired.

Oh, hey, there's an airline agent checking in a 9/11 terrorist even though he has a carry-on bag. Stupid airline agents.

Excuse us all, writer Cyrus Nowrasteh and director David L. Cunningham, for not acting like Hitler Youth in the glory days before ordinary Americans knew commercial planes could be turned into missiles.

Idiots.

Cheap emotions are on orange alert. Of all the people who died in the 1993 attack, who does the camera focus on? Ding-ding-ding, you are a winner if you said "a pregnant woman rubbing her belly."

Harvey Keitel and Donnie Wahlberg portray key U.S. agents who give canny speeches about how they can't take out Osama bin Laden because politicians and high-ranking officials balk at giving them the OK. This is the big lie around which other lies scurry, according to both Republican and Democratic policy experts.

If you read some of the investigations into 9/11, you realize fault spreads far and wide, from FBI and CIA agents to politicians of both parties. "Path" depicts most of these Americans as villainous morons, rather than as flawed people committing errors.

The film uses composite characters and ignores some real players. A section centering on Yemen is laughable to anyone who read Lawrence Wright's recent New Yorker piece on Ali Soufan, who was the only Arabic-speaking FBI agent in New York. He was this close to busting the terrorists but got stonewalled by CIA agents who didn't share information.

Soufan was a pivotal point man on the path to 9/11. He is not a character in "The Path to 9/11."

Ground Zero is a sobering soil worthy of facts, not flimsy fiction. The victims of 9/11 deserve 2,996 times more careful and compelling filmmaking than what Nowrasteh, Cunningham and ABC have bored together. They are bearing false witness to the memory of the fallen.

Doug Elfman