Grade: D+

Verdict: Works best as a celebration of firefighters.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

"Ladder 49," as it keeps reminding us, is about the people who run into burning buildings when everyone else is running out.

It's an image forever imprinted on our collective national psyche in the wake of 9/11, and one well worth honoring. As a tribute to these brave and amazing men and women, "Ladder 49" is a triumph.

As a movie, however, it's not even close.

The narrative is on par with the creaky melodrama of "The Towering Inferno." Yes, there's the forgotten kid, cowering behind a curtain of flame and smoke. Yes, there's the shot of a fiery hell reflected in our hero's helmet. And yes, there's even the de rigueur Christmas Eve three-alarm blaze.

Director Jay Russell, himself the son of a fireman, made the heartbreaking -- and heartbreakingly good -- "My Dog Skip," as well as the underappreciated "Tuck Everlasting." He typically has a good touch with sentimentality and stereotypes, but here he can't seem to get a healthy handle on a cliché-ridden script. Sample dialogue: "When you get enough fires, you find God." The movie begins with veteran firefighter Joaquin Phoenix saving a man's life, but finding himself trapped inside a 20-story building still on fire. As he waits to be rescued, his life flashbacks before his (and our) eyes. There's the day he showed up as a rookie, an Irish tune playing in his head, and was introduced to the rowdy guys at Engine 33, Ladder 49, led by their strong but larkish fire chief, John Travolta. (Is it my imagination or does Travolta prefer roles where he gets to wear a uniform?) There's the day Phoenix picks up his future wife, Jacinda Barrett, as she and a friend giggle over vegetables at a supermarket. There's their wedding, the birth of their kids, the good times with the guys and their wives (no female firefighters here). And there's the bad times, when a buddy runs out of luck and everyone has to be there for one another. If you think "An Officer and Gentleman" is a classic movie, then "Ladder 49" is the film for you. It traffics in the same unsubtle, old-fashioned archetypes, meant to leave a lump in your throat, and in the same skin-deep characters going through a series of Hallmark Card situations.

Phoenix and his comrades behave like jolly, prankish frat boys until it's time to get serious and save some lives. But instead of endearing them to us, their shenanigans dumb them down. Which doesn't have to be. Last year's powerful film "The Guys," based on a play cobbled together in the weeks after 9/11, conveyed that boisterous, sometimes boyish bond without reducing these heroic men to beer-swilling dopes. One thing "Ladder 49" successfully conveys the dual nature of the job, where games of pool or ping-pong are inevitably interrupted by fire alarms that send everyone into highly-focused motion — as if they were landing in Normandy on D-Day. The film also doses a good job of showing how ritual bonds firefighters together, so they face death as a team, not as individuals.

Yet there's also a slight smell of exploitation. The movie relies heavily on images and events forever connected to 9/11. The pomp and circumstance of a firefighter's funeral or the booze-fueled comraderie at a wake are understandable — these images existed long before the World Trade Center tragedy. But trapping Phoenix in an office with a computer and a phone — the ultimate 9/11 nightmare — seems unnecessary and manipulative.

Courageous firefighters deserve a better movie than "Ladder 49." Perhaps someday, that movie will be made.