Sappy, trite and boringly routine. This is no way to honor fire-fighters.
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10/02/04
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Ladder 49 (2004)
41
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:153
Fresh:62
Rotten:91
Average Rating:5.4/10
Consensus: Instead of humanizing the firemen, the movie idolizes them, and thus renders them into cardboard characters.
Theatrical Release:Oct 1, 2004 Wide
Box Office: $74,463,263
Synopsis: Joaquin Phoenix is great in this saga of Baltimore firefighter Jack Morrison, whose life starts flashing before his eyes when he becomes trapped in a blazing high rise. Flashbacks chronicle his... [More]
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta, Morris Chestnut, Jacinda Barrett
Director: Jay Russell
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Reviews for Ladder 49
Bearable only to people in deep mourning and vulnerable to emotional coercion. Which is, of course what makes the whole thing so distasteful.
09/30/04
Top CriticOn the plus side, it does occasionally get away with some very effective old-fashioned melodrama.
10/02/04
In its best moments, the film works as both an exciting and formula-breaking action-adventure and as an enjoyably sappy tearjerker.
09/30/04
Despite its honourable premise "Ladder 49" is clunky and earnest in execution. **
10/06/04
It's a good movie.
10/01/04
Arriving just three weeks after the third anniversary of 9/11, this performs the same function as a World War II picture produced in the immediate postwar era...
10/01/04
Idolization doesn't make for particularly compelling entertainment.
09/30/04
A condescending and cloying melodrama, constructed around the almighty flashback and slick in pretending to tell the human story.
09/30/04
Top CriticI would classify Ladder 49 as a 'safe' movie. There's nothing daring about it, but it offers a solid emotional core and there is a touching payoff.
10/01/04
Top CriticAn imperfect but deeply affecting movie about the unadorned heroism of working-class firefighters.
10/01/04
Top Critic...freshness and originality weren't the highest priority for this firefighter drama focused on a post-9/11 brand of sacrificial All-American heroism.
09/29/04
Ladder 49 is the most moving, emotion stirring, film of the year. Joaquin Phoenix will break your heart as Jack Morrison.
09/30/04
It may be years before any writer makes an on-screen firefighter into a loser, let alone a villain. In the meantime, Ladder 49 will stoke the embers on all of our firefighter daydreams.
10/01/04
Top CriticIt's a hose-job of sentimentality and stereotyping. I give it 49 hankies.
10/03/04
If there's an original moment in this tedious drama, I must have been rubbing my eyes for a nanosecond and missed it.
09/30/04
A pleasant, sometimes stirring movie that's riddled with plaster saints --it's all backslapping and camaraderie, which is often agreeable but even more often dull.
09/30/04
As more than one character reminds us, these are men who run into burning buildings when you and I are busy running out. All the boilerplate in Hollywood can't change that.
10/01/04
Top CriticI admire the effort. I just wasn't very interested.
10/01/04
Ladder 49 layers the heroics on so thick that we never get a sense of what goes on underneath all the turnout gear. Once all the smoke clears, there's nothing there.
10/01/04
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