Daylight -

Daylight is a rather routine disaster flick, providing no surprises. Sylvester Stallone stars as Kit Latura, a former Chief of the Emergency Medical Service in New York. A few years ago, he made a poor decision that cost several of his friends their lives, and him his job. Now he works as a limo driver, and just happens to be at the entrance of a tunnel linking New York and New Jersey when it collapses. Apparently some poor-driving punk rock thieves crashed into a truck carrying highly explosive toxic waste, but the cause doesn’t really matter, its the disaster that counts. So, although the explosion takes place in the center of the tunnel, both ends decide to collapse, trapping the handful of unfortunate survivors in a sealed tube under 75 feet of water. Now, limo-driver Kit takes charge of the situation, and manages to talk his way into a one-man rescue of the trapped survivors. The one-way mechanism used to put him into the tube is too hokey to even mention here. When Kit does manage to meet the survivors, they turn out to be such a nasty, annoying group that you wonder why he doesn’t just implode the tunnel then and there. Heck, you’ll want to implode the theater at this point. But if you last, there are a couple of enjoyable stunts here and there. They just don’t always make sense. For example, there’s a scene where someone is stuck floating below the exit in a room filled with rising water. Rather than simply wait for the water to carry them to the exit, they embark on a foolish and much more risky tactic to escape. Anyway, coherent plots are never the strong points of Stallone’s action flix. As I mentioned before, there are several good stunts, and the fx are good, but not spectacular. The whole film has a prechewed feeling about it…whether it’s borrowing from The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or countless other films, nothing in the film is particularly original or thought provoking. While the result is not a horrifically bad film, it is certainly not good, and there are plenty of better films out there.