SCREEN

He's Charlie Fineman, a widower whose wife and three daughters were killed in one of the planes on 9/11, and who is not taking it well, to say the least. Charlie has retreated into an isolated world of video games, classic rock and the endless remodeling of his kitchen when he runs into his old college roommate, Alan Johnson (Cheadle), a cosmetic dentist with a superficially perfect existence who's quietly having a bit of a midlife crisis. Alan reaches out to Charlie, Charlie resists at first, and slowly the two forge a strong bond that helps them both come to terms with their issues.

Writer-director Binder doesn't have much of note to say about grief, and Sandler doesn't help with his irritating man-child histrionics, but Binder does have a decent understanding of male friendship that shines through in some of the film's quieter moments. Reign is nowhere near as odious as Binder's awful 2005 film The Upside of Anger, primarily because the filmmaker's hostility toward his female characters is pushed to the side, in a nauseating subplot about a patient with a bizarre sexual fixation on Alan.

The use of 9/11 as a plot device could easily come off as crass, but Binder underplays it to the point that it's almost unnecessary—what's relevant is not so much how Charlie's family died, but simply that they're gone and he's unable to accept that. You could accuse Binder of grasping for false gravitas, but at least this time around, you can't accuse him of being insincere.