It's hard to wring fresh sentiment out of the melodrama of a family tragedy, and dressing the loss up in muted tones of 9/11 red white and blue doesn't make it any less tired of a road to wind down for a few hours. The stories shortcomings aside, this was a very well directed and acted movie. The lens framing was particularly interesting to me, always in tight on the subjects, their faces, panning out only so far as the width of a city street (or when Liv Tylers body was in the scene - go figure). Cheadle gives his typical well measured performance, and Sandler plays the dramatic bits well if you can forget that the voice he's using is the same as his Billy Madison. The movie goes in for a few emotional sucker punches, the only one connecting when Sandler confronts his inlaws after a particularly painful (in many ways) courtroom scene. This cast and director deserved just a little more meat on the scripts bones.