Back in the Seventies, we watched all the big disaster movies: AIRPORT, THE TOWERING INFERNO, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, etc. I even read Arthur Hailey’s novel AIRPORT that was the source of the movie. It was hardly my favorite genre, but I found those movies to be reliable, if forgettable, entertainment.
So when I came across DAYLIGHT, a 1996 Sylvester Stallone movie I’d never seen, I didn’t hesitate. The description made it sound very much like one of those earlier disaster movies: some thieves fleeing through a tunnel under the Hudson River in New York City cause a wreck with a truck carrying toxic waste, and the resulting explosion and fire close off both ends of the tunnel, sealing a dozen or so survivors in there to look for a way out.
It's lucky for them that a taxi driver up on the surface is really the disgraced former chief of Emergency Services (Stallone, of course), who’s the only one who can figure out a way to get into the tunnel and lead the survivors out.
Naturally, before that we get a number of scenes introducing us to the characters who will make it through the explosion (and some who won’t). There are no real villains in this movie except the thieves who cause the disaster with their attempted getaway, and they’re not around long. Most of the movie is Stallone vs. the tunnel. The other characters are stereotypes: the would-be writer, the bickering couple and their teenage daughter, the old couple and their dog that used to belong to their dead son, the heroic cop, a few convicts from a transport van. But even though we’ve seen them all before, they’re still handled pretty effectively.
DAYLIGHT really plays a lot like CLIFFHANGER, another Stallone movie from a few years earlier in which he also plays a guy who’s the best at what he does but has personal demons from past failures haunting him. And like that earlier film, DAYLIGHT is well-made, well-acted, decently written (Stallone isn’t credited as one of the writers but contributed to the script, as usual), and an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. That’s plenty for me.
1 comment:
"...the old couple and their dog that used to belong to their dead son..."
I feel like it's stretch to say that appears frequently enough in media to define as a stereotype, per se. I can name a dozen examples of the others easily, but pretty much no other occurrences of that one. Is it a commonplace trope in some genre I don't know much about? Those sappy Hallmark family movies maybe? Was there series of weird, super-dark reboots of the Shaggy DA that I missed?
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