DAYLIGHT
A film review by Alex Brenner
Copyright 1996 Alex Brenner
Daylight is a film that demands an unusual amount of attention from the critical eye, given its nominal genre. It is, overall, a success, and before cries are raised of conclusions coming at beginnings, this shall be qualified.
Daylight is a film that will not let itself be categorised as a single thing, and there is very little associated with it that can simply be nailed down and left; there is a significance to this that extends into genre history, as will be explained later. In its origins, in the performance of its star and even in the camerawork, there is not a single thing which can be said to dominate. For instance, Stallone here seems to run through his entire oeuvre: the stumbling, melancholy Rocky; the mythic action hero from Cliffhanger and Judge Dredd; the man who is both bowed down by and an inspiration to the people who surround him, the socially flawed icon of bravado that runs through all of his work but was most callously exploited in Stop, or my Mom Will Shoot! This is supposed to be his last action film, and it is in some way a summation of all that has gone before: when explaining to the principle heroine an incident from his past, his speech is so obscured that it is actually incomprehensible. Stallone is, as ever, laconically himself.
And yet this summation cannot be seen as synthesis. Works that have displayed a true wit in bringing together disparate elements usually exude an elegance and a great coherence which is lacking in Daylight. To evince further: the film veers between forms. In its opening scenes there are suggestions that it will open out into a traditional gung-ho action film. However, as the darkness closes further and further around the protagonists, we see that it really owes much more to both disaster and submarine films, coming across nothing so much as a cross between Crimson Tide and The Towering Inferno. Still, though, there remains the problem of the nature of this cross: Daylight is neither black nor white, nor even grey, but rather it is many dots of black and white arranged such that, from a distance, it appears to possess chromatic unity, an illlusion that breaks down upon closer perusal. And this is indeed the fate that befalls many films of its type, lacking either brilliance or even the single-mindedness of, say, Die Hard, they are content merely to flop around in a nether world of compromise, neither this nor that, but something rather dissipatedly in between.
It is in resolving this difficulty that we may appreciate the strength of Daylight. Consider the analogy of a parachute: while flaccid, it lacks any kind of life, and is simply a patchwork of different colours all jumbled and crumpled in a heap on the ground, and yet, given a strong motive force throwing it aloft, it assumes shape and form, never the shape and form of something with an integral, durable structure, but shape and form nonetheless. Daylight's somewhat dissolute nature is swept aside as the actual concept and its realisation generate sufficiently huge power as to give the film a real presence and even, on occasion, magnificence.
Still, one remains uncertain as to the origin of this power of realisation, whether it derives from the details, the mini-climaxes, which are often treated with brusqueness by the director - there is one moment when Stallone's character nearly drops an explosive, an event which I neither realised was occurring nor felt the importance of, because it was simply lost in the noise - or from some kind of grand overall sweep untroubled by such trivia, something which the film lacks. It does not come from the performances, nor from the more literary aspects of its plot, more of which later. So, what?
One may reasonably contend that the idea at the core of the film, namely being trapped in a collapsing tunnel under seventy-five feet of water while all around you exists ineptitude and attrition, is so inherently strong that, given a certain minimal level of technical achievement, a high order of suspense would arise necessarily. And the film is, indeed, technically excellent. The camerawork, now jittery, now steady, now whooshing, is really first-rate, and the various cave-ins and blow-outs and explosions are visually very impressive: the eye, being used to confinement, is readily awed by sudden changes in scale and pace. The editing is sharp, and the score is functional at worst and pretty good at best.
There may arise at this point a thought: 'But surely all that, while important, is not sufficient to make the film good?' And with this thought we may agree: there is something more. One often feels that the director has stayed his hand where a less disciplined one - Renny Harlin's? - would have strayed, and the film feels economical. And yet the film is involving. Too often in films of this type, the protagonists are superhuman, and everyone else is simply shot, which is surely not the case with Daylight. This does not refer here to the occasional sentimental moment, or the irritating and superficial attempts to flesh out the humanity of the characters, but rather to the fact that the film does a very good job of giving us an idea of the torment, suffering, and, in the end, sheer exhaustion which they undergo, and this must be to the director's credit. One might not have thought it after Dragonheart, but Rob Cohen seems to know what he is doing. Unfortunately, this rendering of primal humanity is marred by what I think must owe to the script and to the studio executives, that is, the not infrequent moments of aforementioned sentimentality. One gets the idea that this kind of thing is inevitable, and so we must be patient, and await the film's ascent out of melodrama each time it descends into it.
The note which sounds most oddly, though by no means the most unsuccessfully, are the odd hints of a more profound and intellectual agenda that crop up here and there. There can be no doubt that the film as a whole is intended as a dramatisation of a Dantean or Miltonian theme - 'long is the road, and hard, that leads up out of darkness and into the light,' though the film that quoted that line dramatised it both more strongly and with far greater profundity than Daylight. Yet there is also the suggestion of, depending on how you look at it, a Christian or Conradian idea. This suggestion is just the faintest of suggestions, particularly if you choose to look at the issue in the latter sense, but both the illuminated face of the icon of Christ in the pitch blackness of the water as Stallone and Brenneman swim for safety and the path to salvation being described by the abominated rats scurrying amid the same icon's apparel could be seen to redound upon both of these traditions. But this is mere speculation.
In summary then, one may say that, owing to its phenomenal momentum, the flaws of Daylight are almost transformed into strengths, as, like a boat in a storm, it pitches insanely and wildly from side to side, as oppose to just, as it were, dawdling from side to side, and thus, in the shape of the film do we gain a further insight into the confusion and bewilderment experienced by the main characters. A relative of mine once saw fit to describe Crimson Tide as 'a very good bad film,' and, amid cries of plagiarism, I shall describe Daylight as not all a bad bad film, and, strongest in a litter of weaklings, the finest example of its type that we have seen this year.
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