Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: It’s all disaster movies, in honor of Independence Day (the holiday and the movie) and also in light of the real-life disaster movie happening outside our windows.
Daylight (1996)
It was good to be a disaster movie in 1996, the year Independence Day, Twister, and The Rock topped the box office. But it was not a good year to be a Sylvester Stallone disaster movie. Though still a massive star internationally, the Rocky heavyweight was in a slump in the U.S., and Daylight—released on December 6 with a reported budget of $80 million—would ultimately earn only $33 million domestically. “The premise was really good but it didn’t deliver,” Stallone told Variety in 2013. A lot of action stars would probably say this about a lot of their stinkers, but in this case he was right: The premise is really good.
More in the vein of The Poseidon Adventure than Earthquake, Daylight traps a dozen people—all survivors of a massive explosion— in the Holland Tunnel between Lower Manhattan and Jersey City, 100 feet below the Hudson River. With seemingly no way out, the authorities have to send someone in. That someone is former New York City emergency medical services chief Kit Latura (Stallone, of course). Much of the film is right out of the disaster-movie handbook. Its stock group of survivors includes a heroine who is stronger than she knows (Amy Brenneman); a group of hot-headed, orange jumpsuit-clad juvenile delinquents (Stallone’s son Sage among them); a dysfunctional couple with a teen daughter; an elderly couple with a dog they consider their child; a tunnel officer with a girlfriend on the other end of his walkie-talkie; and a wealthy jerk businessman (Viggo Mortensen) who thinks no stinkin’ tunnel could ever get the best of him. Shaky ground, explosions, and rising water levels provide expected threat after expected threat, while the fear of a complete tunnel collapse and/or loss of oxygen looms over their entire struggle.
But unlike other films of its ilk, Daylight doesn’t burn daylight. It takes less than 11 minutes to introduce all the relevant players, and just four minutes later the massive explosion has trapped them. 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. Stallone plays to his strengths, carrying most of the action sequences, including a tense scene involving massive fan blades. But there’s always been more to the Rocky writer, and he handles Kit’s insecurities with a subtlety that most of his action-hero contemporaries lack. Insecurities actually play a large role in grounding screenwriter Leslie Bohem’s script : From the revealing final words of one unlucky member of the group to an almost shockingly truthful moment of panic and desperation from Brenneman’s failed playwright, the characters seem real even when we know the explosions are staged.
Daylight was part of a dying breed. Its reliance on practical effects seems quaint compared to the digital spectacles higher up in the 1996 box office. And while the disaster-movie deluge continued with the likes of Dante’s Peak and Volcano in 1997 and Deep Impact and Armageddon in 1998, audience tastes changed dramatically after 9/11, with Hollywood pivoting to stories of war heroes and superheroes as the nation healed from its real-life crises. In the years since, Daylight has mostly been forgotten, even among fans of the genre. But don’t count it out. If it finds a whole new audience, who knows, maybe it’ll join Independence Day and Twister in becoming a franchise decades later.
Availability: Daylight is currently streaming on HBO Max. It can also be rented or purchased digitally on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, and DirectTV.
54 Comments
Always enjoyed this movie back in the 90s, great score too
I vaguely remember seeing this.
I vaguely remember it’s release and not wanting to see it
I was a kid. Dad brought it home from blockbuster. Family movie night.
I remember the fan blades from the trailer.
I might’ve even seen that part on cable. Was there another movie like that? Maybe I’m thinking of the windmill hole from Holey Moley.It does look a lot like The Poseidon Adventure .
The fan blade scene is like…what if Ethan Hunt rappelling into the secure room in the CIA in Mission: Impossible didn’t go through a rewrite? Too many layers of complexity for a suspense sequence.
“Okay, so, you’ve got to go three sets of fans, and they all operate on a timer, but all three timers are staggered, and they reactivate in sequence; and also the space between the fans gets smaller every time you go down. Are you following any of this?”
Do you vaguely remember ‘Daylight’? Pepperidge Farm vaguely remembers.
Highly recommend the Action Boyz podcast episode that covers this film.
I absolutely remember this movie and enjoyed it. I was just thinking of it the other day.I don’t remember Viggo Mortenson as a business man though, wasn’t he supposed to be a famous rock climber or something?
Yeah he was the CEO of an REI-esque business
I remember seeing it, probably on cable. It was mindlessly enjoyable, probably one of the last disaster films of the old morality play model, where you can readily predict who will survive based on their virtues/vices.
Both: he’s a former athlete who owns a sporting goods retailer.
Yeah, he’s like…Richard Branson, if Branson had become famous for the X-Games?The territory beyond…it’s still out there.
I know the guy has a big range and lots of good movies under his belt, but watching Aragorn drink bottled water in a blonde wig just doesn’t track.
How could someone blessed with the gift of sight think that those baggy suits ever looked good?
It’s funny how jarring changes in male fashion can be. It does change over time, but I think what makes the past look so odd is that the range of change is pretty limited, and you don’t think things are really different.That was how a powerful, successful guy looked bck then — like maybe he was built like a linebacker under those clothes, you just couldn’t tell.Send a guy in today’s sleek fashion back in time, and he’d look like hopeless skinny nerds in highwater pants wearing a suit he grew out of in junior high.It’s happened incrementally so it’s sort of like boiling a frog, but I’ll tell you my crotch can tell the difference between the clown suits of the late 90s and today’s nut stranglers.
Considering how my middle area’s changed shape since the 90s, I’d kill to go back to the style of the time.
SPOILER ALERT!And he died like a freaking badass.Went to climb up an elevator shaft that was unstable. Just as the giant pile of debris was about to crush him, he spit out his gum in defiance of his impending demise.
If people had actually seen this movie? That scene would be iconic.“I always make it…Mr. Latura.”
I was also thinking of this one the other day! Partly because I noticed it on HBO Max, and partly because I was reading Consider the Oyster by MFK Fisher, and of all the weird dumb random things my tween brain remembered from that movie was Stallone’s strange little monologue about the first man brave enough to eat an oyster as the weirdest pep talk ever.Haven’t seen it in ages, but I recall catching The Poseidon Adventure on cable years later and thinking, “Huh. This is basically identical to Daylight,” but it has always been the epitome of solid dumb cliché 90s action movie back when the “huge” stakes of a movie were a single structure and a dozen or so people instead of the entire planet or half the galaxy. Need to rewatch it soon.
I remember seeing this in the theater and having the audience break into applause when the dog who had disappeared shows up and is saved from an incoming flood. There was no applause when any of the humans were saved.
I mean, I’ve been alive for slightly over 4 decades and I’ve met two bad dogs in that time. Now, bad people? That would require a pen and paper to start figuring out.
There are a few bad ADR lines in this movie, but none worse than “Yo! That’s the old man’s dog!” when the dog returns to the group. I guess initial test audiences were confused and thought that this was a different very distinct-looking dog showing up out of nowhere in the final 10 minutes of the movie.
“Wait whose dog is it supposed to be, I don’t get it?”“God dammit, you’re the director, you put it in there!”
I’ve seen so many movie dogs exist entirely to get the easiest, most sentimental “aaaaws” that in the rare event that one dies in a movie I’m like “Yeah, finally! This is an earthquake/volcano/alien invasion that can get shit done!”
A lot better than you’d think and Stallone comes out of it looking absolutely beaten down. Also, my daughter was screaming at the screen, “THEY’RE NOT GONNA KILL THE DOG! THEY BETTER NOT KILL THE DAMN DOG! DON’T YOU DO IT MOVIE!!!”
It was an ok movie, I did enjoy it but thought that the competition, Beavis and Butthead, Mars Attacks, and Evita would be a little too much. It probably did fine compared to some of the other Dec. releases like Virus with Brian Bosworth.
I’ll have you know I saw this movie in theaters, and I don’t know why
I distantly recall Stallone hyping it up on the basis of it pushing the action-movie concept as far as it would go. Though the fact that it was a disaster movie might’ve been all the pushing he was talking about.
I just watched this for the first time about two months ago, when it was covered on the podcast Action Boyz. This movie rules. It’s the kind of disaster movie that Hollywood hadn’t really made since the 70’s, and it doesn’t bring anything new to the table but executes the formula really, really well. It’s astounding how quickly it moves – like the write-up points out, the cast is introduced and the tunnel comes down within 15 minutes.
Also, there are so many fake-outs in that early stretch. You expect a few characters to play a more prominent role in the ensuing 2 hours – nope, they’re just there to cause the cave-in accident and immediately die. It’s established that Stallone left the NYC emergency rescue services in disgrace, so of course the guy who replaced him as chief is going to fight him every step of the way for the next hour, right? Nope, the replacement is killed in the same scene he’s introduced, and Stallone’s back in command. Again, the movie isn’t wasting its time or yours.
Now I have my disaster movie.
If only Roy Nord had gill-slits, he’d still be alive
For some reason, when reading this article, I was thinking “why no mention of Christian Slater?” Then I realized I was thinking of Hard Rain.
One of the many many interesting films in the always underrated Stallone’s career, for sure.
You left out the most important element connecting this film to the classic 70s disaster epics: the theme song, performed by Donna Summer.
If it finds a whole new audience, who knows, maybe it’ll join Independence Day and Twister in becoming a franchise decades later.
Seems like a pretty unlikely franchise subject — but certainly a potential “reboot”. What will those neo-Nazis blow up next?
“Not another tunnel flood! Why do I keep traveling through these things!”
EVERYBODY OUT OF THE CHUNNEL! EVERYBODY OUT! THE CHUNNEL’S GONNA BLOW!
“It was good to be a disaster movie in 1996, the year Independence Day, Twister, and The Rock topped the box office.”the only way The Rock can be considered a “disaster movie” is knowing that it enabled Michael Bay to make more movies.
as great as it is, The Rock made Mike legit and so assumably led to Pearl Harbor, Pain & Gain, Bad Boys 2 . . . and really any number of those Transformer sequels.
as far as i’m aware, it’s not only his only great movie, it’s his only good movie. it does have its charms, but that first Transformers is only “okay” in my book.
I remember watching this movie and that I liked it, but absolutely nothing else.But how on earth can you possibly mention action movies from 1996 and not include the glorious film that is Executive Decision?
Executive Decision wins the Janet Leigh award for best… dammnit, even 2-odd years later, I still can’t spoil it!
Nightmare fuel- for some reason both the Holland tunnel and the Lincoln tunnel give me THE FEAR when driving through them post 9-11. Boston’s tunnel maze to Logan Airport sucks for me too, only because I could not imagine a worse scenario than being stuck in a collapsed tunnel with the water rising than in Boston with a bunch of Red Sox fans. Geesh.
Daylight is up there with Cliffhanger and Demolition Man in Stallone’s solid career resurgence of the 90s.
This was one of those films that Australian TV showed roughly every three months on Sunday nights, along with ‘A League of Their Own’, ‘A Few Good Men’, and that white water rafting movie where Kevin Bacon is the bad guy.
Shit yes it was. Throw in Back to the Future Part II, The Firm and Look Who’s Talking as the movies which were endlessly repeated through the 90s and 2000s.
I remember Kevin being mad at the kid for making a fish trap.
The River Wild… which had a phenomenal cast, looking back. Meryl, David Strathairn, Bacon, and John C. Reilly as the four principles. That was a solid action movie, but weird to see Meryl and Strathairn in, well, not action hero roles, but action hero adjacent as normal people thrust into a thriller.
I think my local paper gave this a fairly decent review, but the singular reason I have avoided it is because of Brennamen. I absolutely love Heat, but I swear her character and presence in that film just annoys the shit out of me. I’ve read her bio on Wikipedia multiple times and none of it makes any sense to me. My favorite imagined conversation:“It’s a drama, about a judge, and it’s gonna star Amy Brennamen.”“Let’s call it ‘Judging Amy’!!”
Does anyone know if the Stallone film has any direct DNA from “Short Walk to Daylight”, which I saw multiple times on television in the 1970s? They were in a subway tunnel, at first thinking that it was just a derailment, but then it turns out to have been an earthquake and they are even more trapped. Multiple obstacles, only one of which is water:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069263/
Hah, I was typing a comment about this very film when I looked one post down and saw your post. James Brolin, of course! I sort’a remember it now. I want to say it was a ‘nuclear apocalypse’ drama. The survivors knew something happened but they didn’t know what and grew increasingly fearful of what they’d find when they reached the surface.
I remember the movie and while watching it reminded me of a TV movie starring James Brolin as NYC police officer leading passengers out of subway: Short Walk to Daylight (1972)
If I recall correctly, this is the movie where Stallone’s hero keeps saying “I’ll figure it out, I’ll get us out of here!” and as people keep dying he keeps repeating it with more and more desperation and despair. This elevated “Daylight” above the rest of its ilk for me, because the hero was extremely fallible and knew it, and it ate him up every time he failed. Unique for a 90’s action film!
This is one of those movies I never remember, but will almost always watch when I stumble across it on TV. It’s so dumb but so entertaining, probably because of how dumb it is.
I watched the hell out of this movie when it came out. Loved it.