Days of Thunder (Blu-ray)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

"You build me a car, and I'll win Daytona next year."

Here's another crowd pleaser done up in high-definition picture and sound. Star Tom Cruise and director Tony Scott made "Days of Thunder" in 1990 as a follow-up to their highly successful "Top Gun" of a few years earlier. Replace jet fighters with stock-car racers and you get the idea.

Somewhere, I remember reading that stock-car racing is one of the biggest spectator sports in America, maybe the biggest, which is surprising considering the popularity of football, baseball, and basketball. But there you are. With Cruise and Scott at the wheel and a solid fan base behind the stars and the sport, the movie had a lot of built-in support.

"Days of Thunder" is practically interchangeable with "Top Gun." You'll remember from the first film that it featured a cocky, young hotshot; an overbearing rival; a grizzled veteran; a love interest with a beautiful, well-educated woman; and a whole load of conflicts involving all of them in one way or another. So, now you know the plot for "Days of Thunder."

Personally, I've never seen the appeal of watching a bunch of cars driving around in circles. I can understand, though, how it would be easier than a road course for the spectators to see what's going on. With a Formula One GP event and most sports-car races, for example, you can only see a portion of the track. But what do I know. I don't like to watch baseball or basketball, either, and prefer football and boxing. To each his own. Like "Top Gun," "Days of Thunder" attempts to inject a heap of drama between the racing scenes, and it tries to make the personal lives of the characters at least as watchable as those in "Top Gun." Too bad the racing action in "Days of Thunder" doesn't match the excitement of the dogfights in "Top Gun."

Director Tony Scott is no stranger to adventure movies. Besides "Top Gun," he's done things like "Crimson Tide," "Enemy of the State," and "Man on Fire." This time, however, he collaborated with screenwriter Robert Towne ("Chinatown," "Personal Best," "Mission Impossible") and Cruise himself on the script. Apparently, it was too easy just to revise slightly the "Top Gun" scenario, which is what the resultant movie turns out like in any case.

In "Days of Thunder" the filmmakers continue to leave no cliché unvisited. Nothing happens in the story that we don't fully expect. Cruise plays a cocky, determined young rookie stock-car driver named Cole Trickle, who, naturally, has to prove himself to everyone, including himself. Cruise is good at doing cocky and determined whether it's "Top Gun" or "Mission Impossible" or "War of the Worlds." If you like what he does, you'll like him here. Robert Duvall plays an old racing-car engineer and crew chief, Harry Hogge, whom a local car dealer, Tim Daland (Randy Quaid), lures out of retirement to head up a racing team he's putting together. John C. Reilly plays their chief mechanic, Buck Bretherton. The early-on villain in the piece is a rival driver, Rowdy Burns (Michael Rooker). Did the screenwriters think these names sounded like Southern good ol' boys: Cole, Hogge, Buck, Rowdy? I dunno. The names just sound corny to me and poor excuses for creating real characters.

Cole seems to have the mentality of a six-year-old, and Rowdy is no better, so they go to it on the track, crashing their cars into one another as often as possible. According to the film, this is common practice in professional stock-car racing. Do drivers in real life nudge one another occasionally, either accidentally or on purpose, and are collisions a part of the sport? You bet. Do the drivers constantly behave on the track as though they're in a demolition derby? Hardly. They're professionals, after all. And in the movie, not a one of the 800,000 people watching them as they throw their cars at each another notices anything untoward. Well, at least no one notices except the racing commissioner, Big John, played by Fred Dalton Thompson. Thompson, you'll remember, is the guy who looked so much like a senator, he became one. Now he's back to playing big shots like his character in "Law and Order." Anyway, after half a racing season of Cole and Rowdy roughhousing on the track, Big John (I swear, that's what he's called in the film) finally orders them to stop. Good eyes, big guy.