Some gorgeous images of fire, swirling and undulating with almost a shifting-sand, simmering-pot sort of subtlety. Also some standard fireball images of the kind you get when any One-Man Army launches a bazooka rocket into the opposition's ammo dump. And while the finale socks you with spectacular sights at approximately the tempo of Mike Tyson on the speedbag, the effect is blunted by an equal or greater degree of ridiculousness. Obviously and understandably a Herculean effort was felt to be needed to build up the charisma of the professional firefighter in anyone's eyes but those of a young male presently in the what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up phase of life (and prior to the how-much-do-you-want-to-earn-when-you-grow-up one). Fittingly enough, the movie is never more thrilling than in the pre-(or mid-)credits sequence pictured from a child's-eye view, with a fireman's son getting to ride along with Dad in the cab of a fire engine, watching him at first being confident, then being heroic, then being dead. There as everywhere, the movie doesn't know when to quit: the fireman's helmet bounces in slow-motion at the son's feet, the boy picks it up and examines it with evident disquiet at not finding the familiar head inside it, and a photographer captures the vignette in a Pulitzer Prize-winning shot on the cover of Life Magazine. This sort of thing fits right in with a beefed-up, steroid-popping storyline that augments the firefighting with a murder mystery, political corruption, and leisure-time romance (the coitus atop a firetruck is interruptus when the truck pulls out of the station house with siren wailing and red light flashing), after the fashion of a bigger-is-better Arthur Hailey bestseller. Kurt Russell, William Baldwin, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rebecca De Mornay, Donald Sutherland; directed by Ron Howard. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd