2.5 out of 5 stars

Rating: 5/10 (5 February 2002)

In the first big-budget, Hollywood stab at car racing since `Days of Thunder,' we are given an ESPN-like montage more suitable for SportsCenter than your local multiplex. Joe Tanto (Sylvester Stallone), a veteran driver with several skeletons in his closet, is brought back to racing by a handicapped, but still shrewd, racing manager (Burt Reynolds) in order to coach a young star (Kip Pardue) to superstardom. His assignment: teach the kid how to handle the pressures of racing so he can overcome the erstwhile German champion, Beau Brandenburg (Til Schweiger). Director Renny Harlin gives us a film that is more Hollywood than Daytona: drivers with playboy looks, beautiful women switching sides like WWF sidekicks, and an endless web of soap opera love stories and past feuds. Shot in a Bruckheimer-like vision of constantly moving cameras and endless jump cuts, the film is a series of car crashes linked together by short, meaningless conversations and annoying broadcast overplays. Despite all this, for some reason I wanted to like this film, and, in the end, I did not hate it. Maybe because it allowed itself the break the rules (with a super-ridiculous higher-than-high speed car chase through downtown Chicago) and play with melodrama (with a sexless love-triangle straight out of the 5th grade). Like car racing itself, the entertainment value is higher than any other remotely redeeming quality.