Metacritic reviews

In typical Rob Cohen fashion, it does exactly what it says on the tin. But that's all it needs to be the visceral rollercoaster ride we all expect.

Director Cohen keeps the vehicle cruising in fourth gear, hoping the audience won't get too impatient with the familiar scenery. Big, efficient, mindless entertainment.

The assembly line of adrenaline-pumping obstacles makes the two-hour runtime fly by, though director Rob Cohen (DragonHeart, The Fast And The Furious, xXx) still manages to highlight a handful of quieter moments.

Although this film has more cracks than the collapsing tunnel, thrill-seekers in search of two hours of cinematic action will find that Daylight falls considerably short of being a disaster.

Until the patently preposterous finale (you can just hear the studio suits saying, "Ya gotta make it big"), the miserable perils faced by the damp, sooty, squabbling motorists are claustrophobically convincing, assuming you accept in the first place that they escaped a fireball that looks as though it should have fried every living thing between the New Jersey and Manhattan shores.

Daylight is the cinematic equivalent of a golden oldies station, where you never encounter anything you haven't grown to love over the years.

Had Latura et al. paused for even a moment to acknowledge what they were doing, Daylight might have been a whole other ball of fire.

What Daylight lacks is the knowledge of its own limitations. The only really hysterical line is delivered by Sly's son, Sage Stallone, who plays one of three young prisoners also stuck in the tunnel...Surrounded by rubble and rising water, he gazes longingly at the 14-year-old Harris and says, "If we don't die in here, I was wondering if I could give you a call. . . ."

It will seem suspenseful only to those who wonder whether Mr. Stallone can get the dog out alive.

The script fires off clunker after clunker so fast you don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I chose to laugh as I'd already done enough crying at The English Patient.) Vintage bad Stallone, this lost-in-the-shuffle Summer of '96 blockbuster is just what you thought it would be: loud, boisterous, and without a single original line of dialogue. It's enough to make you miss Judge Dredd.