Days of Thunder

Tony Scott – 1989 – USA

It’s a Tony Scott film starring Tom Cruise.  In that sense, Days of Thunder fulfills its promise as well as you can imagine.  For party poopers like me, sadly, this primarily means a lot of eye-rolling and jeering at the relentless barrage of shamelessly predictable cheesy melodrama.  Understandably eager to cash in on the success of Scott and Cruise’s previous collaboration – the quintessential 80’s movie Top Gun (1986) – this film does little more than pluck Cruise’s character from that film and drop him intact into this one with a new name.  I almost would have had more respect for it all if they’d just made it a sequel, as if Cruise’s smirking, motorcycle-riding, lone-wolf-with-a-vulnerable-side just gravitates from one industry to another according to his whims.  The racing scenes are exciting, but in between them are clichés that you can probably reel off in your sleep; threatened older rivals, arrogant hot-shot younger rivals, cantankerous coaches, weasely team owners, implausibly icy but beautiful romantic interests.  Will Tom find the inner strength to lower his emotional barricades enough to let love in and give him the serenity to win the race?  You better believe it!