Daylight

In typical Rob Cohen fashion, it does exactly what it says on the tin. But that's all it needs to be the visceral rollercoaster ride we all expect. Read full review

If the spate of action movies must continue, especially at Christmas, let more be like "Daylight." [6 Dec 1996, p.13E]

Solid work from an actor long thought incapable of as much. [6 Dec 1996, p.5]

Director Cohen keeps the vehicle cruising in fourth gear, hoping the audience won't get too impatient with the familiar scenery. Big, efficient, mindless entertainment. Read full review

The assembly line of adrenaline-pumping obstacles makes the two-hour runtime fly by, though director Rob Cohen (DragonHeart, The Fast And The Furious, xXx) still manages to highlight a handful of quieter moments. Read full review

Although this film has more cracks than the collapsing tunnel, thrill-seekers in search of two hours of cinematic action will find that Daylight falls considerably short of being a disaster. Read full review

Speaking of bangs, the special effects include one of the better mega-blasts in recent memory: vast fireballs tear through the busy tunnel at dizzying speed and with devastating results. This is the money shot, what the Stallone audience is paying for. It remains to be seen if they'll buy a Stallone who's been downsized and reformulated - about a teaspoon's worth of added complexity. Read full review

This $80 million disaster epic takes us back to the simple, tacky pleasures of Irwin Allen's "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) and "The Towering Inferno" (1974), although Allen's blockbusters had more of a feeling for character and mythic resonance than "Daylight" ever demonstrates. [6 Dec 1996]

Daylight sets a record for implausible scenarios and lack of character development. But let's face it if you're going to be stranded in a fireball, you might as well be stranded there with Sylvester Stallone. Twenty years after "Rocky" punched him into the limelight, Stallone presents a more human-scaled character, and he's charming, even gracious. His acting range may not span Manhattan to Jersey, but he inspires confidence even in material as pre-fab as this. [6 Dec 1996, p.59]

Until the patently preposterous finale (you can just hear the studio suits saying, "Ya gotta make it big"), the miserable perils faced by the damp, sooty, squabbling motorists are claustrophobically convincing, assuming you accept in the first place that they escaped a fireball that looks as though it should have fried every living thing between the New Jersey and Manhattan shores. Read full review

Daylight is the cinematic equivalent of a golden oldies station, where you never encounter anything you haven't grown to love over the years. Read full review

Had Latura et al. paused for even a moment to acknowledge what they were doing, Daylight might have been a whole other ball of fire. Read full review

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. . . ." Read full review

A disaster of a disaster movie that veers from the parodic to the preposterous. [6 Dec 1996, p.03]

It will seem suspenseful only to those who wonder whether Mr. Stallone can get the dog out alive. Read full review

The script fires off clunker after clunker so fast you don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I chose to laugh as I'd already done enough crying at The English Patient.) Vintage bad Stallone, this lost-in-the-shuffle Summer of '96 blockbuster is just what you thought it would be: loud, boisterous, and without a single original line of dialogue. It's enough to make you miss Judge Dredd. Read full review

Daylight is a lower-echelon disaster thriller, in which the best character is knocked off early on and the leading man runs out of ideas with a third of the picture still to go. Noisy, technically proficient actioner about a group of people trapped in the Holland Tunnel after an explosion gets off a few decent blasts, but is just too limited in scope, imagination and excitement to burst out as a major B.O. winner domestically. Read full review

Yet another silly disaster movie, where the special effects are believable and the characters aren’t. Read full review

Combined with the sluggish story line, Daylight becomes a chore to sit through: The only people who want to get out of the tunnel more desperately than the characters in the movie are the ones stuck in the theater. [6 Dec 1996, p.5G]