JaynaB
Predictable plot but not bad: family drama in which two highly competitive sisters take different routes to their parents' attention. One is feminine and soft, the other a lean, mean, fighting machine (literally).All the family infighting, and the fighter daughter's struggles to earn the respect of her fellow firefighters, rang mostly true if not breaking any new ground, although I did not find that character's physiology or physicality particularly convincing even when she was supposedly staggering along under huge loads during training. Her trainer's romantic overtures were predictable but not overdone.Where the movie really fell apart was once the wildfire started. Not much passed the common sense smell test even if you know as little about the profession as I do. For our heroine to be the movie's biggest action hero required that a whole lot of characters with far greater expertise do incredibly stupid and unprofessional things to take themselves out of the running.It might be the fault of the script focusing on triteness or a director addicted to dramatic overkill instead of coaxing the human truths out of the actors, but basically this was a potentially good story that overshot too many marks.
mjmonasmith
To those of you who are firefighters who review this movie, don't you think we already understand that it isn't realistic?? It's called poetic license, and it's done all the time. I don't mean any disrespect to your profession and I greatly appreciate the expertise that it takes to do your job, but can't we just appreciate it for what it is, an entertaining movie??? I'm a nurse and a former scientist, but I don't bag all the movies where I see inconsistencies with reality, I just take it that the producers haven't had the years of education it takes to fully understand the job, and enjoy the film. Give the movie a break. If you take it for what it is, it's quite enjoyable.
brightfamouscucumber
Former Baywatch babe Brook Burns plays the role of Kristin Scoot, a woman seeking success in an apparently all-male world of firefighters, and, according to this flick, she does find success, again and again and again, only to meet criticism and scorn from her all-male co-workers, until she finds herself in a situation where they all feel overwhelmingly compelled to applaud her at the very end (of the flick).I can usually overlook a few technical errors, a few shabby bits of computer graphic imagery, a few story-line flaws, or a few shots of inept acting, and still enjoy a decent story line. Sadly, I must say that even the story line was a failure, as it completely failed to develop any of the characters enough to be understood, much less be sympathized with, and by no means empathized with.The very best thing about this flick is that actress Brooke Burns still displays her patently stunning smile. Of course, that is also one of the worst things about this flick, as she displays that smile in no fewer than a dozen moments where in real life, anyone's ability to smile more than a very weak smirk would likely mark him (or her) as a lunatic.Another thing done quite poorly in this film were the computer generated forest fires and flames. Clearly, filming without real flames is a lot safer for actors and actresses who are not certified safe enough to perform stunts, and it drops the cost of the overall production, but, to see a scene where our young heroine Kristin crawls on her belly beneath the blazing trunk of a fallen tree -- and then PAUSES -- without receiving third-degree burns to her back, the back of her head, her neck, legs, and arms, is just plain insidious, because of all the young heroine worshipers in the audience who might just try a similar-looking REAL stunt of their own.Nor did many of the computer-generated parachute drops appear to be very real, but at least those didn't look any less dangerous than they can be in real life.As for the story: I happen to have been trained in my youth as a forest-fire fighter, not a jumper, but in my state's forest-fire-fighting reserve. My job was mainly to cut fire lines and stay alive. I was also trained somewhat in the realm of search and rescue. In this flick's opening scenes, the heroine is portrayed as turning off her radio in order to listen for a missing person's shout, which is expected, but NEVER would you turn off your most valuable lifeline without first broadcasting your intention and your location, just in case for some reason you fail to get it turned back on, and NEVER EVER EVER would you attempt to actually perform such a rescue as our heroine without indeed turning it back on to alert everyone withing range of both your success in locating the victim and what you were about to do. In real life, our pretty heroine would have been fired the very moment she got back to camp, regardless of who her father might have happened to be; she would never have been allowed to be put into another unsafe situation, like the next firefighting scene which claims the heroine's father's life.But the very worst part of this flick is the way the heroine's father is portrayed on the day of his impending doom, being the very last day of his twenty-six year career in a small-city fire department, after having been given his retirement party, and after having been told not to report thereafter, out of a not-really-all-that-superstitious belief in bad luck to do so. Yet, there he is, on his very last day, not only singing and humming, but actually celebrating the alleged GOOD luck that on the very last day of his career, another call comes in. This, in my opinion, is VERY bad taste. I have never met a career fire fighter of any age who has ever reacted so brazenly insensitive as that. All real fire fighters I know acknowledge themselves as being nothing short of a very necessary evil in today's society. They realize that the very fact that anybody actually pays them for the job they do is because they combat the much greater evil of anybody losing life, limb, and/or property, if it can be prevented. They don't celebrate anything that might cause harm to anybody else. At most, they celebrate the opportunity to exercise their training, but they NEVER call it good luck. Ever.Again, in my youth, I was trained to be a firefighter, not just in forests, but my little cow town's volunteer department. Between the time I became old enough to enroll, and the day I left town for college, we had absolutely zero fires and nobody in need of being rescued by us. As a result of that, I was never actually paid so much as a penny in exchange for all the mandatory meetings, training and public-relations activities that took up so much of my otherwise free time, yet THAT is exactly what a real firefighter calls good luck. The firefighting lacked authenticity, the acting (directing) was mostly sophomoric and unconvincing, and the story was just barely above becoming absurd. If you're looking for an authentic movie about firefighting and search and rescue, or a realistic role model flick, this is NOT the movie you are looking for. It could have become a thrilling motion picture with a very powerful message about how to hurdle the frustrations of discrimination. I am afraid, however, that all it will become now, is an very unsafe role model story for pre-pubescent girls.It's greatest value lies in the entertainment value derived from its absurdity.
