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MSRP: $29.99 RATED: PG-13
RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Enhanced Home Theatre Mix
• Everyday Heroes: Real Stories From Real Firefighters
• Deleted Scenes
• The Making of Ladder 49
• Robbie Robertson "Shine Your Light" Music Video
• Audio Commentary with Director Jay Russell and Editor Bud Smith

 It’s tough being a fireman. Not only do they have to have cajones the size of boulders to run into a burning building that’s about five minutes from falling down on top of them, they’re also stuck with the distinction of not having a single film about their job that’s actually been great. Decades ago, John Wayne starred in Hellfighters, about firefighters on an oil rig, to disastrous results. Ron Howard took a stab at the heroics of fighting fires a decade ago with Backdraft, and while it boasted a pretty good cast, it got bogged down with heavy-handed melodrama and one silly as hell climax.

Last year gave us two similarly plotted stories about firemen and their struggle with being underappreciated in their day to day lives in two different mediums: TV’s Rescue Me and Touchstone’s Ladder 49. Not surprisingly, they also ended up with two different levels of success. Rescue Me finally managed to grasp what it was that made a fireman courageous while at the same time boasting some really fine acting and characterizations. The bigger-profile release was Ladder 49, however, boasting some big-budget explosions and paired fading star power John Travolta and rising wattage Joaquin Phoenix. A solid performer at the box office, it arrives on DVD with all the fire of an automatic candle lighter.


AMC's foolish decision to have a Uwe Boll movie marathon led to the spontaneous combustion of an entire apartment building. There were mercifully no survivors.

The Flick

Ladder 49 has the distinction of being the first major film to not use a gimmick to make the story of firefighters more accessible to audiences. Hellfighters was about firefighters facing off against an oil rig fire, Backdraft was about a serial arsonist who used fire to kill people. Ladder 49 is just about firefighters in Baltimore, and in that respect it gets some props. The guys in the station are all flawed, normal guys at the end of the day, and the added stress makes a good deal of them irritable and moody.

Naturally, the easiest way to introduce everyone is to have a rookie come into the place, so enter Jack Morrison (Phoenix). Fresh faced and eager, he’s so earnest to get in on the action that he storms right into a burning building without a single idea as to where to point the hose. John Travolta, phoning in a performance as the head of the firehouse, takes little Joaquin under his wing and teaches him the dos and don’ts of firefighting. There’s still the problem of making the rest of the squad like him, something that’s surprisingly easy (how better to get a bunch of Irishmen in good graces with you than getting them drunk?)

He quickly settles into life at the house, though, and the movie begins to show it’s main and most fatal problem—it’s narrative sound but horribly dull. We’ll get flashes and brief skirmishes with character arcs and conflicts within the house, but most of the firefighters seem content sitting around drinking beers with grumpy looks on their faces. There’s one veteran firefighter (Robert Patrick, very good with what little he has to play with—this man’s had one of the worst turns of luck in his career, and I hope things continue to get better for him) that still doesn’t like Joaquin too much, but he keeps most of his complaints down to a low grumble.

Joaquin meets, falls in love with and marries Jacinda Barrett, who none may remember from The Human Stain, and throughout the film they build a family together, while his continually dangerous workdays leave her worried sick that she might not have a husband to come home to her one day. The character is pretty one note, left to sit around and repeatedly tell Joaquin what a dangerous job he leads.


Following Dr. Stanz's orders, Joaquin made it a point to polish his pole every morning to ensure that no one would ever ask him if it still worked again.

All this action is juxtaposed with scenes taking place in the modern day, showing Joaquin trapped in a deadly inferno with a broken leg and no route of escape. The film starts off here, flashes back, and the rest of the film is spent flashing backwards and forwards so randomly that it makes the editing in Ray look downright normal. The setup and execution of flashback in this movie is really kills the tension and makes the whole affair pretty damn boring—by showing us present day and then going back to the start of the story (some 15 years prior), we’re left with absolutely no suspense as to whether or not Joaquin’s or Travolta or Patrick or almost any of the fire squad is going to make it out of the latest seemingly suicidal rescue mission into a burning building—because we know these characters have to survive to get to the now, their actions in the past are well executed but robbed of all tautness. There are several “action” scenes involving firefighting, and most of it is done realistically and with the actors actually interacting with burning objects (and, in the film’s best sequence, dealing with the blind horror of navigating a smoke-filled room), and they’re certainly the highlights in the film. Only one sequence, in which Joaquin pulls a John McClane out of a window to save a trapped man, had me saying “yeah, right”. The rest are filmed with precision and finesse, which is a shame because the plot structure robs them of the suspense they work so hard to earn.

Outside of the firefighting scenes and some early on plot beats detailing the day-to-day monotony of living in a firehouse (and the thanklessness of performing such dangerous tasks), the film quickly falls into cheesy melodrama. There’s little plot here you wouldn’t find in a cheap made-for-Lifetime movie of the week, probably starring Neil Patrick Harris and Tom Berenger. It’s a real shame, too, because the initial idea of examining the unappreciative, unrewarding job of risking your life to save others is really interesting (and like I said, Rescue Me showed that it can also be done very well.)


The Nation's Goosed #1

What really irks me is the ending, which screams to me that either the director or the screenwriter got lazy and just gave up trying to wrap the film up. It’s horribly convoluted and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you apply a micron of intelligence to the scenario presented. Much had been made about how dedicated Travolta and the rest of squad were about saving Joaquin, and how they were so committed to that goal that they worked tirelessly for hours on end without breaks. It could have been a nice plot point, but the outcome serves a single purpose: to make you cry, sacrificing all logic and coherency just to make you reach for your coherency. And can we get a cease and desist on The Inspirational Montage Flashback Endings? They’re incredibly hokey, as this movie demonstrates, and serve only to frustrate the hell out of me. Is it too much to ask that a movie have an actual ending, not an unneeded refresh on the past two hours. It’s lazy handling like this that pisses me off about how much money gets wasted on totally bland stuff.

5.6 out of 10

The Look

Not a bad transfer, not too shabby. The cinematography in the fire scenes stand out, but it’s not something you’d use to show off the pretty colors in your home theatre system.

7.0 out of 10


The neighbors finally complained enough to convince Lucifer to patch that damn hole in his roof.

The Noise

Comes with a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, which is pretty worthless in the dramatic scenes but stand out when they enter a burning building, plunging you into the hell right with the characters. Unfortunately, there’s more of the former than the latter, which is a shame because it’s obvious the sound guys had a blast going at this.

7.5 out of 10


"Are you deaf? Learning impaired? Want to know what it feels like to have a liquid metal knife shoved through your head? I said pass the fucking salt."

The Goodies

The Making of Ladder 49 is your standard package of how wonderful the movie is and how happy everyone was to participate. The principals did go through firefighter basic training, and they showed how when you see a character in the film fighting a fire, it’s primarily the actual actor there putting it out (the fires were controlled, however, for the sake of safety and reuse of sets).

Everyday Heroes: Real Stories from Real Firefighters is basically director Jay Russell, Travolta, and Phoenix going on about how great firemen are and how committed they are to their work. It’s a commendable stance to have and it’s not a horrible feature, but it is a little self-congratulatory.


Seriously, John. I gotta know. Battlefield Earth? What were you THINKING?

There are five deleted scenes, four of them throwaway extensions of other scenes, with one true standout, about the character’s reactions to the events of 9/11. Hours after the towers fall, the fire station is flooded with supplies and gifts from people to show their appreciation to firefighters in general, to which one wife of a firefighter remarks “The men there were doing the same job they’ve been doing every day of their carrers; where were these supplies then?” It’s a profoundly astute and accurate observation about how a great deal of us only started giving a crap about firemen’s jobs when they experience a horrible tragedy. It’s handled better than any other character moment in the entire movie, and it got bunted to an extra feature.

The audio commentary is only worth listening to if you truly want to know how they shot the fire scenes. I particularly didn’t care all that much, so I found it pretty boring.

Finally, there’s a music video for Best Song Oscar wannabe “Shine Your Light”. I put it up with “Faith of the Heart” on the schmaltz-o-meter. It’d be best if you forgot this feature exists. Finally, there are some trailers for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, National Treasure, and Home Improvement: The Second Season.

6.8 out of 10

The Artwork

The floating heads of Joaquin and John look dramatically on as a minature firefighter does all the work. It's not a horrible cover, but has two things railing against it: a)It's floating heads, and b) This cover boasts a quote from The Best Critic Ever, Larry King. Two fatal blows to its quality.

5.7 out of 10


Adam's attempt at making beef tips for a thousand people all at once using the world's largest pressure cooker had disaterous consequences.

Overall: 6.3 out of 10