DAYLIGHT
A film review by Michael Redman
Copyright 1996 Michael Redman
*1/2 (out of ****)
Remember "The Poseidon Adventure"? It was one of the grandfathers of the modern disaster movies, spawning "Airport", "Towering Inferno" and zillions more. The latest off-spring takes after its ancestor more than just in theme.
Somewhere in a small darkened room in LA, a studio executive sat watching the upside-down ship disaster and had a flash of insight. They could remake the film, but set it in the Manhattan-New Jersey tunnel and cast Sylvester Stallone. There would be all of the same elements that were in the popular movie from over 25 years ago: running for higher ground to escape drowning in rushing waters, fires burning from the walls for no apparent reason, hold-your-breath underwater scenes, a racially and socially mixed group of survivors trying to make their way to the top while some die on the way. And it will make tons at the box office.
This is what is known in Hollywood as a "high concept". Out here in the real world, high concepts often result in what is known as a "bad movie".
A car-jacking trio of punks decide to make their getaway in the tunnel -- it=92s easy to understand why they turned to a life of crime since the= y obviously couldn=92t get into the college of their choice because they didn't understand the spatial relationship of how a tunnel works. The equation 1 Exit =3D Easily Trapped never crosses their minds.
It turns out that it doesn't matter much as a few seconds later, their vehicle careens into a truck loaded with toxic waste which blows up in a fireball that shoots down the tunnel much like the scene from "Independence Day". So much like it that it seems a waste to have spent all of those big bucks on the special effects when they could have just clipped film from "ID4".
The blast collapses the tunnel on both ends and kills the crooks and just about everyone else on the highway except our intrepid band of barely adequate actors. Stallone is on the outside and must jump through a series of gigantic fans to come to the rescue. The fans can only be turned off for a few seconds and each conveniently comes equipped with a red digital timer installed, I suppose, so that anyone having to vault through them would know how much time he has left.
He gets in, some people die, some live. Some are brave, some are not. There's a lot of water and explosions. There=92s a big dog. No one cares.=
[This appeared in the 12/12/96 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at mredman@bvoice.com
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