Release Date: October 1, 2004
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, Jacinda Barrett, Morris Chestnut, Robert Patrick, Jay Hernandez
Directed by: Jay Russell
Written by: Lewis Colick
Distributed by: Buena Vista Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (intense fire and rescue situations, language)
It turns out that one of the many things that have changed in post-September 11 America is the way Hollywood makes its firefighter movies. Before 9/11, firefighters -- laboring under the perception that they were basically special-ops garbage men, the guys you call to clean up the fires -- were not the kind of civil servants you’d see turning up in a movie like Ladder 49. If anything, this would’ve been called Precinct 49, and it would’ve starred Baltimore’s finest rather than its bravest.
But here we are, post-9/11, a world in which firefighters are unquestioned, de facto heroes. If there’s any doubt, one needs only to watch the adoring, reverential Ladder 49, a formulaic but enjoyable action drama directed with considerable gusto by Jay Russell. Gone are the villains, rivalries, and arson plots of Ron Howard’s famous firefighter movie, 1991’s Backdraft; in Ladder 49, it’s simply the heroes versus the fire. Sure, these firefighters haze the rookies, and they fight and curse and shout when things get tough, but at the end of the day, the members of the Baltimore Fire Department’s Ladder Company No. 49 have each other to fall back on.
It is a fascination with this fraternity-like bond that dominates the Lewis Colick script, which frequently implies that firefighters, having so often confronted death, danger, and destruction, have attained a higher level of kinship than mere mortals. There are unfortunately few surprises in how it plays out -- you’ve probably seen all of the firehouse pranks, karaoke singing, weddings, births, firefighters picking up girls in the supermarket, and St. Patrick’s Day parades in the trailers -- but it is undeniably well acted and staged. The stars, like John Travolta and Joaquin Phoenix, have the rugged good looks and ballsy indifference to death that we expect to find in our post-September 11 firefighters, and Russell and his crew do up a number of spectacular fire scenes that keep the movie humming from start to finish.
Ladder 49 begins with a wicked, 20-story blaze in Baltimore’s industrial waterfront, the kind of towering inferno that most would take one look at and decide to cut their losses. Unfortunately for Jack Morrison (Phoenix), the Baltimore Fire Department has no such luxury, and he soon finds himself trapped beneath a pile of rubble inside the building. As firefighters on the outside work to get him loose, the movie flashes back to the beginnings of Jack’s career.
Travolta plays Jack’s commanding officer, Chief Mike Kennedy, and the role is remarkably straight-arrow for an actor who seems to favor more dynamic, flamboyant parts. But then Ladder 49’s decision to cast its characters as uniformly heroic leaves little room for dimension; the only variation is what sort of spin the actors put on it. For the younger guys, it’s youthful exuberance, which will soon be tempered into the grim determination of the longtime firefighters. Jay Hernandez plays a novice firefighter named Keith, who becomes Jack’s best friend; Morris Chestnut is a good-natured veteran named Tommy; and Robert Patrick is Lenny, another old-timer who gets to offer up the standard grouse about being too old for this shit.
Also as a younger man, Jack meets and falls in love with Linda (Jacinda Barrett, the story’s pretty but unremarkable love interest), who, even though the flashback scenes take place something like 10 years earlier, seems to initially regard her firefighter beau with typically American, wide-eyed admiration. But when Jack requests a transfer to the more dangerous search-and-rescue work of his station’s ladder company, Linda begins to view Jack’s chosen profession with something surpassing apprehension -- naturally foreshadowing the numerous scrapes with death that Jack is about to encounter.
The movie’s greatest value is in its firehouse procedural scenes, which were missing amid all the melodramatic fireworks in Backdraft. Ladder 49 is more concerned with the day-to-day operations of a firehouse, and the human value of these scenes carries the movie through the more familiar fire-fighting sequences. We get a behind-the-scenes look at the firefighters (when they’re more like professional frat brothers), as well as the critical moments between the alarm sounding and the trucks tearing out of the station. It’s an uncertain tension not unlike the five minutes backstage before the curtain goes up on a Broadway show.
This isn’t to say that the fires aren’t interesting, only that they lack the genuinely thrilling atmosphere of danger. The ideal firefighter movie should put the heat of the flames on the viewer’s skin, and choke the audience’s collective breath with thick, black smoke. Since Ladder 49 is constructed out of flashbacks, we know that Jack has to make it through to the end, if not with his entire company intact, since the movie also has the studio-produced actioner’s propensity for dispensing with one or two supporting characters.
Fire can be a tricky thing to film, though, but despite all the missing suspense and standard plot tricks, Russell and his crew get it right. The enormous waterfront blaze that bookends the story is an extraordinary thing in itself, a fire that makes the Jack and the guys in his company look back on the other fires in their careers with a curious fondness. “And you thought you knew what a bad fire was,” the looks on their faces seem to say, and as they rush into harm’s way once again you might find yourself wondering if firefighters aren’t just a little bit deserving of the country’s admiration. Fortunately, although Ladder 49 certainly promotes it, the film is mostly indifferent to whether or not the viewer subscribes to such post-September 11 hero worship; it’s a fun movie to watch either way.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)