Ladder 49

Just smoke: Ladder 49 is a trite, misty-eyed tribute to firefighters

By Anthony Del Valle

There's a message in director Jay Russell's Ladder 49. Not only are firemen swell guys, they're swell heterosexual guys. Lewis Colick's script subscribes so heavily to a typical pre-adolescent boy's fantasy image of maleness that never once does it slip and create a three-dimensional hero.

Baltimore. Modern day. Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix) is helping his outfit fight a 20-story fire. He saves someone. Then the floor caves in and he falls several stories below. As he lays apparently dying, he looks back on his past. Lucky for him, he apparently lived a life full of happy clichés.

He remembers his first day on the job when his co-workers pulled all kinds of cute little pranks on him. His new boss, John Travolta, greets him in his--would you believe it--underwear! And another wild and crazy co-worker puts a goose in Jack's locker that shits all over his stuff! Are these guys too much or what?

But even though these outrageous cads play rough, they're really devoted to each other. We can tell that by the way they get drunk together all the time. Drinking is important to these rugged men, the way drinking is important to all real men.

Women are important too. At one point a fireman convinces his squadron that he's gay. Everyone looks stunned, as if bin Laden had just joined the Republican Party. Then the guys find out the fireman was just kidding, and everyone laughs and laughs. I mean, we all know no fireman could possibly be gay, no real fireman anyway, so what a relief to find out this fine hunk of heroic maleness is just as normal as the rest of us.

Jack eventually meets a young woman (Jacinda Barrett) who can outdrink his mates, so naturally, it's love at first sight. She's a hot babe until they get married. Then she becomes a nagging shrew who keeps telling Jack she wants him to get a safer job. (Wives of firemen and cops only exist in the movies to nag their husbands.) What's weird, though, is that when, 10 years later, Jack finally decides to get a safer job to appease his wife and two kids, she says a safer job wouldn't appease her at all. "I deal with [you being a fireman] because I'm proud of you, baby," she chirps. The line is a shock because we haven't seen her deal with it at all. Every word out of her mouth since they got married has been a complaint.

There's a death of a major character in the end, and everybody cries and hugs and makes speeches. There's even a long musical montage of happy firemen going about their duties. When the credits finally roll, you half-expect the ushers to take up a memorial fund collection.

Ladder 49 insults its subject matter. It suggests that firemen are as shallow and simple-minded and lacking in variety as cardboard caricatures. It could have been fascinating to get a behind-the-scenes look at these lives. How do men who on a daily basis voluntarily put themselves in danger explain that decision to their wives--and maybe even more interestingly, to their young children? What sort of bond develops between people who constantly share life-threatening experiences? And how do these men react to the image the outside world has of them (especially post-9/11)? You won't get any answers from this film, which is rich in testosterone and devoid of thought.

There are, though, some first-rate action sequences, and a very fine performance by the always-reliable Phoenix. He's not given much to do, but he fills the void well.