LADDER 49
(one star)
A washout.
Running time: 115 minutes. Rated PG-13 (intense fire and rescue situations, and for language). At the AMC Empire, the Kips Bay, the Battery Park City, others.
THE tedious and obnoxiously manipulative “Ladder 49” plays as if the filmmakers compiled a list of every smoke-eater cliché imagin able and then resolutely set about crossing them off.
Old-dog fire captain mentoring young-dog rookie? Check.
“Wacky” firehouse pranks to facilitate bonding? Check.
Heart-warming Christmas Eve rescue? Check.
St. Patrick’s Day booze-up? The Pogues on the soundtrack? Check and check.
“Ladder 49” – essentially an enervating slog through the life of one-dimensional young firefighter Jack Morrison (a stolid Joaquin Phoenix), told in flashback as he lies trapped in a burning building – has less drama than an average episode of “This Is Your Life.”
This painfully predictable schmaltz-fest, set in Baltimore, ostensibly pays tribute to the courage of firemen, but Lewis Colick’s criminally lazy script and the hack work of director Jay Russell (“My Dog Skip”) suggest an ill-conceived attempt to exploit post 9/11 hero worship.
The film opens with a 20-story grain warehouse ablaze. After Jack has helped a worker to safety, the floor under his feet opens up and he plunges onto the floor below.
As his colleagues try to reach him through the smoke and debris, the injured Jack’s life flashes before his eyes in excruciatingly mundane detail.
He meets and marries Linda (Aussie newcomer Jacinda Barrett). They have children. (“We’re not afraid ’cause we do it to save people,” Jack tells his son about his dangerous job.) They eat dinner and squabble. Jack loses a friend in a fire.
All the while, Captain Mike Kennedy (John Travolta) looks on benevolently from the sidelines. (At one point, he actually trots out the line, “Firefighters run into a burning building when everyone else is running out.”)
Apart from some jarringly fake-looking CGI rats, Russell’s depictions of urban infernos are realistic enough, but the film stalls in between these intermittent action scenes as it plods through a procession of baptisms, weddings, funerals, birthday parties and the endless frat house, er, firehouse hijinx.
There’s a feeble stab at making one of the firefighters (Robert Patrick) into a heel, but otherwise there’s practically zero character development – which is strangely at odds with the film’s desire to humanize these everyday heroes.