Cruise about to gnaw on some Duvall.
The farmer mechanic is your enemy. Now he’s your friend. Your racetrack opponent is your enemy. Now he’s your friend. You almost died in a crash. Now you’re fine. That’s Days of Thunder in a nutshell – a film that forgets each scene immediately after it ends.
This celebration of short term memory loss stars Tom Cruise as Cole Trickle (yep!), a rookie Nascar phenom with eyes on Daytona as well as his doctor, Claire Lewicki, played by future wife Nicole Kidman. Dr. Lewicki is quickly wooed by Cruise without much of an ethical dilemma and she immediately transitions from a globe-conquering doctor (she still retains a strong Australian accent) to a race track hottie. Shortly after consummating their deep love, Trickle demonstrates a race move on Lewicki’s bare leg that uncomfortably reminded me of the animal cracker scene in Armageddon.
There really is not much to Days of Thunder. Not much of a script, not much of a story, not quotable, few running sequences from Cruise and, maybe a bellwether for 1990s action flicks, there was no random nudity. The only thing going for the film was Hans Zimmer’s score, a somewhat obnoxious (yet wholly fitting and entertaining) celebration of synthesizers that had me looking through the credits for Vangelis.
