Days Of Thunder (1990/Paramount Blu-ray)
Picture: B Sound: B Extras: D Film: D
Top Gun had been such a huge hit for Tom
Cruise, Paramount, Tony Scott and the red hot producing team of Jerry
Bruckheimer and (the now late) Don Simpson that four years later, they were
anxious to recapture that excitement and since Cruise rightly refused to do a
sequel to the that hit, they decided to apply the story structure to something
else. Since jet fighters were out, they
turned to stock car racing and the resulting project was would-be blockbuster Days Of Thunder (1990) which was
anything but. The only winners when all
was said and done were Nicole Kidman and The Coca-Cola Company.
This is
the film where Kidman met Cruise and so began their long affair. Coke has a Mellow Yellow car and the result
was a hit soda pop. As for the rest of
this long 107 minutes, Cruise is a driver named Cole Trickle (the last name
reflecting the box office and was the “drizzle” this Thunder produced) who claims he can do anything with a car. Yes, so many easy jokes could follow, but why
digress. The only thing we can say is
that until the ill-fated 2008 revival of Speed
Racer, this was the worst current race car film in a long line of duds that
lead actors find themselves making that usually don’t work and this bomb
managed to waste Robert Duvall, Cary Elwes, Randy Quaid, Michael Rooker and
Fred Dalton Thompson.
At least
the cars were colorful and all this happened before NASCAR-mania kicked in (no
thanks to this film) showing a less-flashy variation of the sport before it
became more like a wrestling federation.
Robert Towne co-wrote the story with Cruise, then finalized the script
in the weakest work the prolific, risk-taking, groundbreaking writer would
otherwise do (with his help, Cruise revived the Mission: Impossible franchise a few years later), but this was an
overconfident package deal that Cruise somehow survived. The crazy press surrounding his relationship
with Kidman that would last for a decade helped him dodge the damaging effects
of this bomb all the way to their last work together on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut nine years later.
In real
life, Cruise was interested in cars, in part due to his relationship with good
friend Paul Newman and they felt this kind of racing was on the commercial
upswing. In fairness, no matter how bad
this film is, their commercial instincts were correct but made this a few years
too soon. It was also Paramount’s big
film up against another colorful, overrated, commercial dud, Disney’s Dick Tracy. Both helped make the Summer of 1990 a summer
to forget.
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image was shot in real anamorphic Panavision
by Ward Russell (X-Files – Fight The
Future) but the cars always looked better than the stars, who all looked
like they had 12 O’clock shadow and kept forgetting to wear their
sunglasses. Was that realism? In this transfer, the print looks poor, there
is more grain than in the original 35mm print I suffered through and the color
is not as vibrant as it should be. The
Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix is also unimpressive and was never a great soundmix. Cars going around and around and around and
around the track does not offer the sound opportunities of fighter jets, but
this was one of the first digital sound film releases, issued in the now
defunct CDS (Cinema Digital Sound) format.
It had a 5.1 soundmaster and was presented this way in 70mm blow-ups,
offered in CDS 6-channel (not all the CDS releases were 5.1) and Dolby
magnetically stripped 70mm prints. The
sound was never impressive and has not aged well, but this is at least a
generation down, down to the Hans Zimmer score and set of would-be hit records
that never charted.
- Nicholas Sheffo
