Daylight
Any semi-thriller turns into an action packed explosion fest when you have Stallone as the lead, it’s a law of nature. He truly cannot act his way out of a paper bag, Rocky is just an outlier. This is not aggressively New Yorker as The Siege for example, its mostly a generic big city film.
Some mobster adjacent dude want to dump toxic waste (coloured sand, like that water based toy?) in Jersey, but they don’t wasn’t to hire The Sopranos. They hire some truckers to take it there. The bridge is packed, so they take one of the tunnels. At the same time, some punks snatch a diamond dealer out of the street, use bolt cutters on his cuff briefcase, and getaway in hot pursuit by the NYPD. They also take the tunnel.
There are also random people taking the tunnel at that time:
- a prison van taking low level crims to Rikers?
- an upper class old couple
- a couple on vacation with their kid. She is actually a stepdaughter, and she is still on the “not my real mother” phase of the relationship
- a broke-ass playwright woman, who just got semi-dumped by the married man she has been fucking. That guy has the balls to call her while his wife can be heard in the background
- some rock climbing dude that showed up on TV
When the punk dudes crash against the toxic waste and everything starts to burn, the only survivors are those and some rent-a-cop dude working there.
Communication is established, but they cannot save the people before they choke on fumes, it’s up to Stallone, the former fireman bossman to get in there and save their ass, passing by some big fans that cannot be shot down.
After they are all in the tunnel, it’s basically a slasher, where only a few people die trying to get out. They eventually do, some by a magic unknown shaft, others directly to the river. The slashed are the big black guy, the rent-a-cop, and the only upper class lady.
We discover the old couple lost their son in some Nepalese weather hiking incident, and the prisoners are slightly characterised, but it’s all very basic.
Besides Stallone, the cast is quite good: Aragorn, the girl from The Last Boy Scout, the Phreak from Hackers, even Dan Hedaya doing basically nothing. Extra bonus from that woman from Timeless as the doctor up top that needs to be comforted by Stallone as if she is in Saving Private Ryan.
Rob Cohen originally wanted Nicolas Cage to play Kit Latura
Fucking hell executives, why do you keep ruining everything.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.