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Reel Racing: ‘Days of Thunder’ Needs a Reevaluation

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“Top Gun on wheels.”

That was more or less the sentiment of what Days of Thunder was when the 1990 film β€” and first big-budget film about NASCAR β€” debuted in movie theaters 35 years ago.

Three and a half decades on, I’ve come to believe that the Tom Cruise vehicle (get it) was truly done a disservice by critics and audiences alike and didn’t quite get its due.

Frontstretch staple Vito Pugliese and I sat down for my podcast the other day to talk about the movie, part of my “Sports Movie Showcase” series that I do once a month — give or take. Vito saw it in theaters in 1990, while I was born in 1998 and didn’t watch it until 2015, so we each have different perspectives on it. Listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple for Vito’s story about going to the 1992 Daytona 500, where life imitated art thanks to a Dale Earnhardt reverse move akin to Cole Trickle’s 180-degree turn in the movie.

The one thing we share is that we both love the movie. Sure, it took me a decade to come around — not that I didn’t like it when I first watched it on the to-the-day 25th release anniversary in 2015, but I more or less thought it was fine. Now, 10 years and one Tony Scott marathon later, I genuinely appreciate how much it did (or tried to do).

I binge-watched all 21 of Scott’s productions last summer.

Tony was the younger brother of Ridley Scott, the man behind Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, The Martian and The Last Duel. While Tony’s movies never reached the level of fame of his elder brother, he’s developed a cult following of his own (with the hashtag #TonyScott4Lyfe) and he had a truly unique visual style up there with Tarantino, Scorsese, Anderson, Lynch and Nolan.

Days of Thunder is one of my favorites, though it’s indeed outshined by damn-near-perfect films like True Romance, Crimson Tide (starring the recently-late Gene Hackman), Unstoppable and Man on Fire. And it doesn’t have Denzel.

But it’s still really, really good.

The cinematography is impeccable. There’s shots that I couldn’t love more if I tried — in particular when Cole pulls back into the pits after his trial run in Rowdy’s No. 51 car at Charlotte with the sun setting behind the car. The garage shots, when Harry is building the cars, are phenomenal.

The color palette of this thing is saturated beyond belief, and my best example of that comes in the form of the paint schemes. Everyone knows the five iconic liveries from the movie: Cole Trickle’s No. 46 City Chevrolet car (one of the greatest movie cars of all time, for my money); Rowdy Burns’ No. 51 Exxon machine; Cole’s No. 46 SuperFlo hot rod; Russ Wheeler’s soon-to-be-wrecked No. 18 Hardee’s Lumina; and Cole’s No. 51 Mello Yello Chevrolet, which he wins his first race in.

Scott also truly captures just how grimy and dirty and sweaty NASCAR was then — it’s still that way now, because who isn’t sweating their ass off on a 100-degree day in the middle of summer while sitting on hot bleachers — but the cars are caked in flecks of tire rubber after the race. Not only that, the bumpers are falling off, the pits are probably caked in oil and Cole’s face — for some unknown reason — is always covered in dirt. He looks like a trophy truck driver who only has a net for a windshield.

Days of Thunder also clocks in at a respectable 107 minutes, minus a few ticks of the clock for credits from that, which means they did a good job of trimming the fat down. Most scenes feel necessary, there isn’t a ton that feels out of place and the racing scenes are pretty well-balanced out with the NASCAR politics or the romantic subplot with Nicole Kidman.

Cruise and Kidman, of course, got married the same year the movie came out and were together a little over a decade, but near the end of that time they made a MUCH different movie together with Stanley Kubrick.

None of the acting performances are bad — none of them great besides Rooker and Duvall, in fairness — but all of it works toward a movie that’s memorable for mostly good reasons. Not a Best Picture winner by any means (congrats to Anora for taking it home this year, very very good movie), but do we watch movies to be overly critical or do we watch them to have a fun time?

And calling it “Top Gun on wheels” is also shortchanging Top Gun. That movie rocks.

The movie is absolutely gorgeous and got so unfairly shortchanged when it came out. I’m hoping the appreciation continues in the opposite direction and it cycles around to being considered one of the better racing films ever made.

And if you want to experience Days of Thunder in all its 4K glory, you can buy the physical copy on Amazon. I will champion physical media until I’m dead and DoT was number 197 of my currently-213-movie collection. Buy it, watch it, live it. Not sure how much sense that makes, but it sounded good.

Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.

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