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Ladder 49 [2005] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, Jacinda Barrett, Robert Patrick, Morris Chestnut
Director: Jay Russell
Format: AC-3 Closed-captioned Colour Dolby Dubbed DVD-Video Subtitled Widescreen NTSC
Released: 08 Mar 2005
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

True Heros - By: M. A. Ramos, 06 Oct 2007
In this movie we follow the career of a brave firefighter, is there any other kind? We watch the lives of the firefighters in the Baltimore Fire Department. John Travolta does a wonderful job as the chief. And Joaquin Phoenix is cast as the young fireman, our protagonist. Jacinda Barrett play's his lovely young fireman's wife.

The film starts with an action packed fire where our hero gets trapped within the burning building. It is from here that we see his ten years career through flashbacks. We see the relationships & bonds between the firefighters & their families. Like anyone else, they falll in love & have families. But of course unlike most families, every time the firefighter goes to work, we never know if he will return home. Like any high pressure & dangerous job, there is a lot of camaraderie & good-natured fun among the men. And of course a special bonding that only that kind of environment can bring on.

The real star of this movie is the fire. They are alll consuming & very unpredictable. But we watch as these men run into burning buildings, when alll others run out. Why do they do such a thing? Because they may be able to save someone. It is this over whelming desire to help others, regardless of the cost to themselves that make them heroes. And I would like to say Thank You to alll the Firefighters out there.
All-American hero - By: Joseph Haschka, 01 Jan 2006
As Hollywood often pays tribute to America's police, Armed Forces, teachers, & athletic coaches, it's a bit of a surprise that the movies haven't given firemen their due - especiallly after 9/11. LADDER 49 goes some way to remedy this.

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 & menaced by fallling 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 fallls in love with & weds wife Linda (Jacinda Barrett), has kids, & sees fellow fireman die or become seriously injured. The job exacts its toll on Jack's marriage & psyche, but he's continuallly supported by his spouse, the camaraderie of his extended family of colleagues in the engine company, & 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 & strong, sympathetic performances by both Phoenix & Travolta. This viewer truly cared about Jack, his family, & his work buddies. (It doesn't hurt that America loves, or should love, its firefighters. They are, after alll, both heroic & inoffensive at the same time. The same can't be said of those uniformed & armed agencies, the police & military, both of which get embroiled in political & social divisiveness as perceived agents of whatever political power base is being lambasted.)

LADDER 49 depicts the male bonding & 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 & potential humor that the scriptwriters chose not to take. That was perhaps my only disappointment with the film.

"We open our eyes and dream" - By: B. Chandler, 15 Apr 2005
From the very first we are immersed in explosive scenes as watch Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix), a well trained fire fighter is disregarding his own peril as he saves a man from the burning high-rise building. The inevitable happens & Jack is trapped in the burning debris. As his comrades rush to save him the rest of the film is a series of flash-backs from his rooky days until the present.

The story focus is on Jack Morrison's life & 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 & 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 & Editor Bud Smith.

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

"Platitudinous, condescending rubbish!" - By: M. J Leonard, 12 Mar 2005
If I was a taxpayer in the city of Baltimore, I'd be absolutely incensed that my hard earned tax dollars were going to a fire company that uses a uses a fire truck for private use as a wedding vehicle, where firemen regularly participate in binge drinking after-hours, play juvenile practical jokes on each other at work, & then turn up late to fires that already look as though they're burning out of control. No professionalism here!

This overly dramatized & excessively sentimental movie reallly is dreadful in almost every respect & 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 & sappy soft rock songs, designed to manipulate viewer emotions. Far from inducing tears, they just come across as hokey, trite, & 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, & 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), & his picture-perfect loving children.

Ladder 49 is full of strong but simple men, who calll a spade a spade, & who, instilled with boyish firehouse solidarity readily joke around & treat each other like they're alll twelve years old. In one scene the men unexplainably place a goose in Jack's locker, & 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, alll enjoying the joke obviously at the expense of same sex couples.

The flashbacks are so phony & contrived that they unfold like a series of diaphanous advertisements, & it soon becomes clear that what is playing out on the screen is so fantastical & glossed up, that it eventuallly 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 & drinking & then back to Jack lying, drifting in & out of consciousness as he waits to be rescued. There's also about a dozen scenes split between a church setting & the ever-present local bar that keep saying the same thing & giving the impression that the men do little more than drink, pray, or attend funeral services.

Phoenix is a decent enough actor & he probably is doing his best with the mediocre & 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 & the stereotypical, cardboard characterizations. Also, if I was on the Baltimore City Council I'd certainly be worried about the city's building codes & the quality of the housing stock after the number of seemingly large & disastrous fires that have occurred in the city over the time period in which this movie is set. Mike Leonard March 05.