Feet of flames

REVIEWED - LADDER 49:  Either a heartfelt tribute to the victims of September 11th or a shameless attempt to cash in on the enhanced status of fire-fighters in the wake of those attacks, Ladder 49 comes over a little like an advertisement for insurance services. Here is young Joaquin Phoenix getting his first job. Here he is meeting his pretty wife. Here is their first child. Here is the warehouse fire for which they may or may not be covered.

The picture is narrated in flashback by Phoenix as he lies amid burning debris awaiting rescue by dull Captain John Travolta and the rest of his overpoweringly masculine, mostly Irish-American colleagues from the Baltimore fire service. The story, like most lives, meanders along fairly aimlessly without subplots involving stolen jewels or any of the other popular adornments of mainstream cinema. There are fires, of course, and at least one of these sequences - Phoenix lowers himself down a high building to rescue a victim from a window - is pretty darn gripping.

But most of the picture is taken up with the sort of shouty, macho back-slapping which assures those of us in more effete professions that we made the right career choice. The film-makers are probably trying to emulate the robust bonhomie that hangs around all those great Howard Hawks films about manly men doing manly things - Only Angels Have Wings, Air Force, Red River - but the heroes' pranks are so childish and their banter so witless that watching the film takes on the quality of being trapped in a railway carriage with a phalanx of rugby supporters.

Still, Ladder 49 does have some value as a plain study of fire-fighting procedures, and domestic viewers not sated by the immigrant paddywhackery in Clint Eastwood's otherwise excellent Million Dollar Baby may savour another opportunity to lap up green beer and swoon over Claddagh rings.

Ladder 49 will be supported nationwide by John O'Donnell's wry Irish short The First Television, in which a lonely maniac brings a television back to the odd gothic tower in which he lives.