Better than should be, worse than it aims for

Rating: Null/10 (14 May 2001)

I went to this expecting a bad action movie with good effects. After all, it was written by and stars King of Cheese Sly Stallone, was directed by the grand Cheesemaker Renny Harlin and features Burt Reynolds, who was making cheesy car crash movies when Sly was still a bit player.
What I discovered was a racing movie that desperately wanted to be more... it aims for Rocky but lands somewhere around Rocky IV. There is actually an attempt at a more complicated story that your typical sports movie. I will give them points for the attempt, but I think Sly is overreaching, as his writing ability is unable to keep up with his goals. The female characters are underdrawn, mostly unnecessary, and for act 3 unseen. The dramatic structure is rather unfocused as well, In trying to have an antagonist who really isn't such a bad guy, the challenge for the hero isn't as compelling, plus, it's unclear who the real lead of the film is- Sly or the kid. Sly simply has too many plot lines and character arcs going on and can't quite successfully juggle them all.
I accept that in a race movie like this, the races themselves are going to be shown in a "heightened" manner that isn't realistic, and will of course feature far more crashes than ever actually occur. Given that caveat, I found the crashes, often done with digital effects to be quite thrilling & harrowing. Where the digital effects clearly fail though were during the last race for the otherwise impossible to get camera angles, which looked like video game shots. I had to wonder if near the end they started running out of money to fully render the shots.
As for comparisons to Days of Thunder, any objective reviewer will tell you that that film sucked. This one isn't much better, but at least it tries harder.