While Sept. 11 helped embellish the already heroic image of firefighters, "Ladder 49" doesn't owe any direct debt to such recent events. It plays, rather, like an old-fashioned, by-the-numbers drama ...

No one will come out of a theater showing "Ladder 49" grumbling, "That was a terrible movie." Its stars, Joaquin Phoenix and John Travolta, are solid; there's plenty of heart-stopping action filmed ...

In the opening scene, fireman Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix) and other members of Ladder 49 enter a huge burning building. Conflagration has engulfed the edifice and the men search, eventually ...