Bad even for a racing movie

Rating: 4/10 (17 November 2006)

Let's get this straight: I have been, almost from birth, a great fan of auto racing of all kinds (although, admittedly, I've grown to like NASCAR in particular less and less in recent years as it's become just a little bit too big for its own good). I have also been disappointed by every racing movie I've ever seen. Sure, Grand Prix and Le Mans both have some awesome action shots and some really cool cars, but the stories are dead in the water.
And yet Days of Thunder makes both of those earlier films look like great art. This is just Top Gun on the ground, full of a lot of noise and action paired with a fantastically awful, Scotch-taped-into-place love story.
Some of the action sequences are worth seeing, and there are some nice touches of comic relief (the ice cream incident in the pits, for instance), but they're sorely needed because the rest of the movie is so mind-numbingly heavyhanded. All right, I get it. The brash youngster has a lot to learn before he can run with the big boys and win the heart of the...23-year-old brain surgeon? What? Yeah. Nicole Kidman in this role might be the worst casting decision in the history of the cinema.
A muddled mess and a fine example of what's wrong with the action genre: there's plenty of eye candy and super-cool stunts, but you don't have a movie without a story. So they sorta just fished around in the trash until they pulled out a story, and it shows.