Backdraft movie review & film summary (1991)

But then you have the scenes involving fire. They're so good they make me recommend the movie anyway, despite its brain-damaged screenplay. With special effects and pyrotechnics coordinated by Allen Hall, a batallion of stunt men and visual experts allow the camera to plunge into the center of roaring fires, so convincingly that there is never a moment's doubt that we are surrounded by flames.

What is particularly impressive is the way the filmmakers are able to convince us the stars are in the middle of the action. A conventional fire scene uses doubles and stand-ins, over-the-shoulder shots and other evasive tricks, for brief scenes showing men in the middle of a fire. Then they use closeups of the actors in front of a back-projection screen filled with flames.

Similar techniques may have been used here, but they are not detectable. It actually looks as if Russell, Baldwin and the others are right there in the center of blazing tenements and exploding factories, hanging by their fingernails over boiling balls of flame.

I personally doubt that anyone, even an expert firefighter, could actually survive in such conditions for more than a moment or two.

And Russell's exploits are especially dubious, since he prefers not to wear a mask and likes to runs bare-faced into hell, in search of heroism. But it sure plays well.

Chicago is a big city with a lot of firefighters, politicians and fire inspectors, but “Backdraft” is totally conventional as an action movie, and asks us to believe that a handful of the same characters would constantly run across one another, know one another, have histories together, and so on. This limits the number of characters, and makes it extremely easy for the audience to figure out who the bad guy is, since there aren't any extra suspects to mislead us, even if he wasn't written as such a slimy scumbag that you hate him from his first appearance on screen.

“Backdraft” is such a technical achievement that it will probably make its money and become a hit. What I regret is that all of the expertise lavished on this movie couldn't have been put at the service of a more intelligent story about real firemen, real working conditions, real heroism, and the real craft and art of fire-fighting.