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A+ |
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N/A |
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| Acting: |
N/A |
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| Direction: |
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Who snuck a camera into my fire station?
by Rob (movies profile)
Jun 9, 2008
563
of
646 people found this review helpful
I asked myself that several times. The hard work, the hard play between calls, the family life. Ladder 49 seemed less like a feature film and more like a documantery. Call me biased (and many will, I'm sure) but I gave the film the grades I did because they got it right.
The story centers on one firefighter and his two families-the one at home, and the one in the fire station. It is told through flashbacks against the framework of Jack's (J. Phoenix) fellow firefighters work to rescue him at a high-rise fire. The scenes are well scripted, the characters and their actions quite believeable (especially the practical jokes and the way firefighters work and live together), and the attention to detail is almost perfect. Yes, there will be times firefighters will say, "I can't believe they did THAT!", but it doesn't distract from the movie like previous films.
The actors went through training at the Baltimore Fire Academy, and their hard work shows. Sounding a roof, throwing ladders, tagging hydrants, all the actions we perform on a daily basis looked smooth, like they'd been doing this for years. Everyone did their best to get it right. The portrayals of the family and the stresses and fears they must deal with are just about perfect mirrors of real life (after the private screening, one firefighter was heard joking, "Nope, the wife's not going to see this one.")
Being this is Hollywood, some parts of the visuals couldn't be completly real. While you see a good example in one scene of the stratification of smoke layers in a room, you still can see much better than in the real thing. The nosepieces are left out of the SCBA masks so you can see the actors faces, but at least they are wearing them when needed in this picture. On the whole, however, the minor omissions and changes needed to make a movie don't detract from the show. Firefighters and fire buffs will barely notice them, and everyone else won't.
Overall, I have to give Ladder 49 the high grade. The cast and crew did an outstanding job. |
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