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Call It Stallone's Tunneling Inferno
Commute turns hellish in 'Daylight'
San Francisco Chronicle - December 6, 1996
By EDWARD GUTHMANN, Chronicle Staff Critic
DAYLIGHT: Disaster thriller. Starring Sylvester
Stallone, Amy Brenneman, Viggo Mortensen, Stan
Shaw and Claire Bloom. Directed by Rob Cohen.
Written by Leslie Bohem. (PG-13. 109 minutes. At
Bay Area theaters.)
The formidable shadow of Shelley Winters hovers
over "Daylight," a fairly rousing piece of schlock
about a group of people trapped in an underwater
commuter tunnel after an explosion. That's because
the movie, which opens today at Bay Area theaters,
steals so much from "The Poseidon Adventure,"
the 1972 disaster flick in which Winters reached
one of Hollywood's high-camp high-water marks.
Winters doesn't make a cameo in "Daylight," sad
to say, which leaves perennial action figure
Sylvester Stallone and a hardworking if lackluster
supporting cast to shoulder the load. "Daylight"
opens during evening rush hour when a runaway car
races through a tunnel connecting Manhattan and
New Jersey, smashes into a truckload of toxic
chemicals and ignites a huge fireball that annihilates
most of the tunnel and its inhabitants.
At its best, "Daylight" is a major adrenaline rush --
especially when the fireball races with hellish speed,
turning commuters to toast, or when Stallone
performs such preposterously comic-macho stunts
as leaping through the ventilator blades of the
tunnel's enormous exhaust system.
The twist here -- the angle that sets "Daylight"
apart from Stallone's recent grunt-and-flexers -- is
that his character is a failed professional looking for
redemption. A former Emergency Medical Services
honcho, Sly lost his job when he failed to save a
co-worker after a South Bronx building collapsed.
AVERAGE-GUY ROLE
Apparently, this is Stallone's effort to recapture
some of the average-guy sympathy he had as
"Rocky," before he turned into an animated prop in
such cartoony dreck as "Judge Dredd." He gives a
scaled-down performance, but there's only so much
he can do in a standard- issue disaster film that
borrows conspicuously from both "Poseidon" and
"The Towering Inferno."
Like those two classics, "Daylight" brings together
a gang of mismatched survivors who'd never be
caught dead in the same room but who bond
gloriously in the face of possible death. You've got
your token bratty teenager in Danielle Harris, your
mousy-babe-turned- Rambolina in Amy
Brenneman, your sacrificial lamb in good-hearted
tunnel cop Stan Shaw and your token hothead --
think Ernest Borgnine in "Poseidon," George
Stevens in "Airport" -- in Jay O. Sanders.
In the older-woman Shelley Winters slot we find
British actress Claire Bloom as a prim aristocrat.
Bloom's a class act, and she doesn't even attempt to
play this material for laughs or for camp value,
which is a shame. In "Posei don," you had such
jolly ham bones as Borgnine, Winters, Jack
Albertson and Stella Stevens, and their reckless
overacting gave the film a kind of trashy, goony
blast.
TUNNEL HUMOR
What "Daylight" lacks is the knowledge of its own
limitations. The only really hysterical line is delivered
by Sly's son, Sage Stallone, who plays one of three
young prisoners also stuck in the tunnel.
Surrounded by rubble and rising water, he gazes
longingly at the 14-year-old Harris and says, "If we
don't die in here, I was wondering if I could give
you a call. . . ."
Copyright © 1996 San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved.
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