Ladder 49 [DVD] [2005] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

As the film opens, veteran fireman Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix) enters the towering inferno of a burning industrial structure - perhaps reminiscent of the World Trade Center - to search for the living. After saving a life, Jack is pitched by collapsing floors into the basement, where he's trapped by rubble and menaced by falling debris. Still in radio communication with the outside, he awaits rescue or certain death. Throughout the ordeal, the audience flashbacks through Jack's ten years on the job, starting with his first day as a probationer assigned to Engine Company 33 of the Baltimore City Fire Department. As the years pass, the boyishly charming Morrison falls in love with and weds wife Linda (Jacinda Barrett), has kids, and sees fellow fireman die or become seriously injured. The job exacts its toll on Jack's marriage and psyche, but he's continually supported by his spouse, the camaraderie of his extended family of colleagues in the engine company, and the paternalistic master of his fire station, Captain Mike Kennedy (John Travolta).

There are no particular plot surprises in LADDER 49, but it rises above being average via excellent special FX and strong, sympathetic performances by both Phoenix and Travolta. This viewer truly cared about Jack, his family, and his work buddies. (It doesn't hurt that America loves, or should love, its firefighters. They are, after all, both heroic and inoffensive at the same time. The same can't be said of those uniformed and armed agencies, the police and military, both of which get embroiled in political and social divisiveness as perceived agents of whatever political power base is being lambasted.)

LADDER 49 depicts the male bonding and friendly horseplay that occurs between the close knit members of a firefighting company, even to the ritual hazing of the New Guy when he reports aboard. At no point was the New Guy the New Gal, a venture into political correctness and potential humor that the scriptwriters chose not to take. That was perhaps my only disappointment with the film.

The story focus is on Jack Morrison's life and secondarily firefighting in general. Captain Mike Kennedy (John Travolta) holds the team together. John Travolta is believable in the film.

Aside from the numerous clichés and shades of 9/11 this is a well done formula movie.

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The wide screen DVD was very clear on watching on the laptop. This film would be a good candidate for "Superbit".

There are some extras such as an audio commentary with director Jay Russell and Editor Bud Smith.

There is a lot of interesting backgrounds music to the various scenes. This soundtrack is available.

This overly dramatized and excessively sentimental movie really is dreadful in almost every respect and has a cheap, economical B grade TV movie quality that looks like it's been made for late night network television. One of the most awful aspects of Ladder 49 is the incidental music, which consists of a number of terrible and sappy soft rock songs, designed to manipulate viewer emotions. Far from inducing tears, they just come across as hokey, trite, and endlessly annoying.

Ladder 49 takes place over ten years of the life of Jack Morrison (an overly earnest Joaquin Phoenix). The film opens with a spectacular warehouse fire. But after a rescuing a worker, Jack gets trapped inside, and while dazed, begins to reflect on everything he might lose, prompting a series of bathos-ridden chronological flashbacks that heavily involve his career as a firefighter, his turbulent marriage to Linda (Jacinda Barrett), and his picture-perfect loving children.

Ladder 49 is full of strong but simple men, who call a spade a spade, and who, instilled with boyish firehouse solidarity readily joke around and treat each other like they're all twelve years old. In one scene the men unexplainably place a goose in Jack's locker, and in another particularly insulting scene they tease a young Catholic fireman about sex before marriage. He gets them back by saying he can't get married because he's gay; they happily laugh at him, all enjoying the joke obviously at the expense of same sex couples.

The flashbacks are so phony and contrived that they unfold like a series of diaphanous advertisements, and it soon becomes clear that what is playing out on the screen is so fantastical and glossed up, that it eventually bears little or no resemblance to the lives of ordinary firefighters. The film also becomes repetitive as the formulaic fire-fighting scenes repeatedly switch with the countless scenes of the guys horsing around and drinking and then back to Jack lying, drifting in and out of consciousness as he waits to be rescued. There's also about a dozen scenes split between a church setting and the ever-present local bar that keep saying the same thing and giving the impression that the men do little more than drink, pray, or attend funeral services.

Phoenix is a decent enough actor and he probably is doing his best with the mediocre and run of the mill material. John Travolta is also trying to make the most of his supporting role as a drunken firehouse chief. But neither character can rise above the pedestrian, formulaic cliché-ridden story and the stereotypical, cardboard characterizations. Also, if I was on the Baltimore City Council I'd certainly be worried about the city's building codes and the quality of the housing stock after the number of seemingly large and disastrous fires that have occurred in the city over the time period in which this movie is set. Mike Leonard March 05.