Yes, there’s a real driver named (gulp) Dick Trickle, but you can see that Cruise and Towne (and director Tony Scott) are having fun. Towne is a superb screenwriter (“Chinatown,” “Shampoo,” “Tequila Sunrise”). Here, though, with charming impudence, his script is a masterpiece of minimalism–that is, foRmulas, cliches and stereotypes. Trickle is the brash young upstart who vrooms right into the hard-bitten world of stock-car racers. Boy, do they test him. During races they keep banging into his rear end. In fact, there’s so much rearending in this movie that you begin to wonder. Is there a mechanic named Freud in the pit? No, just Robert Duvall as the grizzled crew chief Harry Hogge. (Hogge! Boy, these guys are having fun.)
Well, Trickle proves himself, becomes “the hottest rookie on the NASCAR circuit. " As a sign of his acceptance, his fellow drivers hire a girl dressed up as a highway cop to “arrest” him and then grope him–in close-up. (This movie is rated PG-13.) It takes a woman neurologist, Dr. Claire Lewicki (Nicole Kidman), who’s brought in when he and Burns are injured, to diagnose the flaw in Trickle’s macho character. OK, class, what’s the flaw? That’s right he’s infantile, egomaniacal and afraid But Doc Lewicki has the cure–a good dose of Lewicki. In the big bedroom scene Trickle explains racing strategy, using two packets of Sweet ’n Low as the cars and the Doc’s thigh as the track. It’s a cute-dumb scene just like the love stuff in “Top Gun,” also directed by Tony Scott.
Dirty tricks: In fact, “Days of Thunder” is a wingless, civilian version of “Top Gun.” Just as that movie lived by its hurtling air footage, this one lives by its racing sequences. With long lenses, aerial shots, in-car cameras, karate-blow editing and gear-grinding sound, these are exciting in the current nerve-shattering mode. But every race turns on tactics that are dirty and life-threatening–that endless (and finally boring) rear-ending, plus side-swiping, wall-banging and other maneuvers that seem more like the chariot race in “Ben-Hur” than events you see on ESPN. Are NASCAR races really this filthy?
Even the grizzled Hogge lies to Trickle about the state of his tires in order to get him to make a dangerous move. That’s not very grizzled of you, Hogge. And poor Duvall has to play two scenes in which he talks intimately to the car. Duvall does all this with his usual monumental integrity. And Cruise is … well, he’s an appealing and sincere son of a gun. But he was much more in “Rain Man” and in “Born on the Fourth of July.” Oh well, summer isn’t forever.
