Movie Reviews for Backdraft

Backdraft

	List Price: ~~$14.98~~ Our Price: $7.40 You Save: $7.58 (51%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.85 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases

Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada

Movie Reviews of Backdraft

Movie Review: Predictable but watchable
Summary: 3 Stars

Backdraft sticks to convention and only innovates in its special effects. The plot is rather contrived and provides the excuse for the filmmakers to play with fire -- lots of it.

Movie Review: This Movie is a Capital Crime
Summary: 2 Stars

The big-budget movie Backdraft has a talented cast and director, yet it represents a prodigious waste. The movie is a failure because it has a no-talent actor, William Baldwin, in one of the leads; its otherwise gifted director, Ron Howard, had a bad day; and its screenwriter, hack Gregory Widen, never had a good one.

The story is about Chicago firemen, particularly two brothers whose father died in the line of duty, when they were youngsters. But it gets mystical: "A fire eats ... and breathes ... and hates." Sorry, but fires don't hate; only people hate.

Ron Howard must take his share of the blame for this five-alarm bomb. It was up to him to have the screenplay rewritten, or rather, re-written some more, or better yet, burned. He should never have cast Baldwin in any role, and he utterly wasted the talents of Jennifer Jason Leigh, in an idiotic part. And Howard made the picture clumsy and cloying. In the opening scene, Howard seeks to wring tears from the audience by having a fireman's helmet incredibly bounce out of a second story window, landing right at a little boy's feet. And when Howard lets a monster-fire take over in the movie's climactic scene, the pyrotechnics' emotional effect is zero. A good director deftly manipulates viewers' feelings, but in this movie, Howard has all the subtlety of a fire hose hitting you in the face.

The reliable Kurt Russell does not disappoint. Scott Glenn is good up to a point; that point is when his role, as written, becomes ludicrous. In spite of having little to work with, Rebecca deMornay does good work as Russell's long-suffering wife. And as the slimy alderman, the late J.T. Walsh is appropriately pompous and phony. Robert DeNiro is also good, although he shows the first signs of certain tics that have since become characteristic of his "mailing-it-in" performances. The most enjoyable performance is that of Donald Sutherland, who hams it up as an imprisoned arsonist who helps investigators (a storyline stolen from the novels on which The Silence of the Lambs was based).

But the screenplay is some kind of awful. Gregory Widen shovels one subplot on top of another, and they're all so much manure: The wife of the fireman who understands him, yet who seeks to pull out of the marriage, and pull their son away from his father; the youngish man and woman who have been on a romantic collision course for years, yet who inexplicably part ways without even consummating their passion; and the biggest dungheap of all, the story of a string of fatal arsons, which I won't give away.

Widen allegedly worked for three years as a fireman. I can only surmise that he did it, with an eye toward cashing in on the experience. So much for the authority of experience. And Widen's Backdraft screenplay was the highpoint of his Hollywood career!

And lest I forget, Hans Zimmer's musical score is pompous, insistent and obnoxious, though not quite the monstrosity that his later score for Crimson Tide would be. I guess he was just warming up.

Movie Review: Please check your logic at the door
Summary: 2 Stars

I bought this movie used, thank goodness I didn't pay a lot for it. It's a 2 hour and 15 minute schmaltzfest. Easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The fire scenes were ludicrous even to me, and I have never even personally known a firefighter, but I do know enough to know that they'd be burned to a crisp if they went into a fire outfitted like those guys were. Shallow characters, predictable story lines, and shark jumping all over the place.

In one scene Baldwin and Lee are on a boat belonging to her boss. Out on the water. She says "Get me out of here." The next scene shows them in a firehouse - how they got there is anyone's guess. In the end Russell and Baldwin are in a raging chemical fire with no oxygen or equipment. Logic would tell you that they'd be almost instantly killed by fumes.

This looks like an excuse to blow things up and play with fire, and the story is simply there to make it somewhat plausible. But the story is so stupid and hackneyed it just aggravates. Kurt Russell's talent is wasted in this awful movie. Miss it if you can.

Movie Review: Good suspense and drama keeps one focused on the action.
Summary: 2 Stars

Both my wife and I were in suspense throughout the film. At the end my wife even cried. We had just bought a DVD player and picked this as our first movie. Unfortunatly, We did not check its rating. Too late we found that there was heavy use of four-letter words like f-ing, and GD. That did away any desire to see it again. I cannot recommend it because of its excessive use of profanity.