Backdraft (Anniversary Edition) (DVD)

What is the point of a fifteen-year anniversary? Ten years is an anniversary. Twenty and twenty-five are definitely anniversaries. Fifty is certainly an anniversary worthy of remembrance. But fifteen? What's the point? No one really cares, and unless you are talking about something that's downright extraordinary why should they?

Ron Howard's Backdraft is not that thing. The movie is nothing more than a relatively entertaining firefighter soap opera filled with eye-popping camerawork and little else. It is an overlong muddle of character and schmaltz, a blandly written melodrama made palatable thanks to some strong performances and some dynamic sequences of burning buildings and risky daring-do.

Yet Universal still felt the need to dip into their vaults and unleash a two-disc special edition DVD upon the buying public. The results are passable if unnecessary. The movie looks and sounds fantastic on a home entertainment system, but so what? The special features are less than special while the film itself is definitely not worth the fuss of taking the time to examine. Unless you've never seen it I can't really imagine why a person would want to walk into watching this overheated mess again in the first place.

You get the feeling Howard feels the same. While he makes a few cameo appearances in a couple of the featurettes on the second disc, other than a remarkably lackluster introduction he's almost invisible. Strange, especially for a film he states firefighters continually come up to him on the street and thank him for. If that's the case, where is the audio commentary? Where is the passionate defense of some of screenwriter Gregory Widen's cheesier contributions to the script? Why no examination of the reasons for making the central arson-slash-murder investigation at the center of things so unbelievable and silly?

That is what you don't get. What you do get for your twenty bucks is the same old-fashioned multi-character drama you saw in the theater back in 1991. The same brotherly battle between a suitably grizzled Kurt Russell (who, in all fairness, is excellent) and a woefully miscast William Baldwin. The same hackneyed investigation led by a bored looking Robert De Niro. The same Hannibal Lecter-like silliness of Donald Sutherland's soothsaying master arsonist. The same idiotic romantic shenanigans between Baldwin and an almost ridiculous Jennifer Jason Leigh.

This isn't as bad as I'm making it seem. With a cast this good (which also includes Scott Glenn, J.T. Walsh, Jason Gedrick and Rebecca De Mornay) it certainly is never less than watchable, and when you add in Mikael Salomon's spectacular cinematography sometimes it is even mesmerizing. Besides, fire is the real star of the show and on that front Howard and company score an astonishing bulls eye, the fact that they do so making the idiocy of so much of the rest of it all that much more disappointing.

Universal's special edition is presented in 2.35:1 Widescreen and comes with the aforementioned introduction by Howard, 43 minutes of pointless deleted scenes and five featurettes, "Igniting the Story," "Bringing Together the Team," "Explosive Stunts," "Creating the Villain: The Fire" and "Real-Life Firemen, Real-Life Stories." Only the last one is truly interesting, the short bit on what actual firefighters do while they are in action more impressive and eye-popping than just about anything the actual film itself has to offer.

Part of me feels a little bit cruel railing against this one so hard. I do enjoy bits and pieces of it, and I certainly don't begrudge first-time viewers from taking it in. Heck, portions are remarkably entertaining, the beautifully horrific fire sequences still some of the best I've ever seen put to film. The movie is just so laughable dramatically, and at 138 minutes far too long to have to endure all the sludge to get to the good parts intermingled in-between the chaos. For me, at least, Backdraft is a burn.