By Geno McGahee
In the 1990s, the career of Sylvester Stallone was stalling. Movies like CLIFFHANGER and DEMOLITION MAN were underperforming and his attempted comedies like STOP OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT did not make him the crossover star that Arnold Schwarzenegger had become. In 1990, he went back to the formula that always worked and made ROCKY V, but it flopped. What was Stallone to do? A disaster movie at the right time might resurrect the career of the ROCKY and RAMBO star. Considering that TWISTER, TITANIC and VOLCANO were scoring at about the same time, DAYLIGHT seemed to have the odds in its favor. An established star in a sub-genre that was taking off should have been a hit, but like the other 90’s Stallone flicks, it flopped at the box office.
New York City is the setting, which is a great place to put a film. The city, itself, is always a strong character and we begin to get introduced to the characters that will be put into danger. Madelyne (Amy Brenneman) is an aspiring screenwriter that keeps striking out. She lives in a rat-infested, cockroach-filled apartment and her relationship with a married man is not going well. When a rat says hello to her as she opens her drawer, she snaps and decides to leave the city once and for all, singing badly as she drives.
Roy Nord (Viggo Mortensen) is the owner of a struggling shoe company that is now changing directions in a last ditch effort to save it. He is now trying to appeal to the hiker and the mountain climber.
We have the Crighton family on the road. Steven (Jay O. Sanders) has recently reunited with his wife, Sarah (Karen Young), and their 14-year-old daughter, Ashley (Danielle Harris), is having a hard time with the entire situation. She just records everything with her camcorder and makes her sly comments. Harris is known to most horror fans for her work in the later HALLOWEEN movies and she brings this innocent toughness to every role she is in, which is also apparent here.
A group of prisoners being transferred are also on the road and I want to say the late Sage Stallone did a rather good job in his role as “Vincent”, a small time crook. I blamed him for mostly for the failure of ROCKY V and rejoiced when they got somebody else to play the son in ROCKY BALBOA, but Sage may have been able to pull it off after what I saw with his performance in DAYLIGHT. He definitely worked on his craft going into this one.
We have George Tyrell (Stan Shaw), a worker at the tunnel and his girlfriend, Grace (Vanessa Bell Calloway), on the other side, monitoring the activity. And we have former disaster specialist turned limo driver, Latura (Sylvester Stallone). When all of the characters make it into the tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey, a group of no-gooders hijack a car loaded with diamonds and crash it into some toxic explosive barrels, trapping everyone inside. Latura goes into action and starts helping people outside of the tunnel that were impacted but with people trapped inside, he wants to take control of the situation and save them too.
Unfortunately for Latura, he’s off the force and was part of a scandal where people died. He is the last guy that they want in the tunnel, but desperate times called for desperate measures and he’s back on the case. He survives some near-death experiences and makes his way in, but the group has a long way to go if they want freedom.
With water crashing in and the group moving upwards, I couldn’t help but to think of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, which was a far better disaster movie, but DAYLIGHT had some of the elements. The problem with Stallone in this movie is how flat he plays it. Even when he is delivering some heartfelt dialogue, he does it in a way where you have a hard time connecting with him. I hate comparing him to Arnold Schwarzenegger all the time, but it’s a natural thing to do. What made Schwarzenegger better was his ability to connect with the audience. Even though his acting can be questionable at times, you knew where he was coming from. Stallone seems to be confused, locked into the tough guy persona and didn’t want to shift too much from it.
Stallone can connect and deliver believable dramatic dialogue as he did in ROCKY and FIRST BLOOD, but the 90s was a tough time for him. I blame the 1986 movie COBRA for some of the problem. In that movie, the role called for an emotionless badass and I think that he had a hard time breaking out of it. It took the 1997 film COPLAND for Stallone to rediscover his acting mojo.
DAYLIGHT is a very mediocre disaster movie and easy to forget thanks in large part to the onslaught of disaster movies that came out in the mid-nineties. TWISTER, DANTE’S PEAK, TITANTIC, INDEPENDENCE DAY, DEEP IMPACT and VOLCANO did well and were much larger than DAYLIGHT. Now DAYLIGHT is not a bad movie, but I think the reason it didn’t do that well was that the audience lost faith in Stallone considering his track record leading up to it. It would take some time for Stallone to recover from the lackluster 90s. It took the 2006 ROCKY BALBOA to bring him back to the big screen the right way.
DAYLIGHT has its moments. Viggo Mortensen was very good in this in the minor role they gave him. Had they put him across from Stallone throughout, this film would have had more going for it. The biggest problem with this is that Stallone just doesn’t seem into it. He’s robotic and flat and there is never that real feeling of danger. There is no chemistry with him and Brenneman and these are things that needed to happen to make this movie really work and resonate with people. Not to keep referring to ROCKY either, but the chemistry between Stallone and Talia Shire was a key ingredient to the success of the series. We don’t get that here.
As a Stallone fan, through good and bad, I do recommend DAYLIGHT, but it definitely is not the best performance for Sly. It has some very good visuals and some of the performances of the other characters were quite good, but the film has to live and die with Stallone and he just doesn’t bring it. I recommend it, but it’s not one of the better disaster movies.
Rating: 6/10
