Review: Days of Thunder (1990)

Tom Cruise as Cole Trickle in Days of Thunder

I have zero interest in NASCAR, so I was shocked to be so taken with Days of Thunder when I finally caught up with it. Perhaps it helps that it stars Tom Cruise and that I watched with my dad, who has a fondness for mainstream movies from the 80s and 90s—he particularly loved Robert Duvall’s grumpy old pro who leads the pit crew for Cruise’s young hotshot. Or perhaps it’s the simple fact that Days of Thunder is a real movie.

During the opening 10 minutes, as director Tony Scott unleashes all the glorious hallmarks of well-made mainstream cinema of the period—the real sets, the considered use of depth in the frame, the dynamic blocking, the golden sheen!—I felt like the Vince McMahon meme, nodding ever more vigorously as I drank in the glorious spark of mainstream cinema as it’s supposed to be constructed.

It’s not that I hate movies today—I probably like many mainstream works like The Mandalorian and Grogu more than most critics—but it’s that movies just don’t look or act like Days of Thunder anymore. To be clear, Scott’s film is an absolute fantasy, essentially transposing the exact plot of Top Gun to the NASCAR scene and calling it a day. But it’s absolute gravy to watch, thrilling in the big race scenes, lovably corny in the romance between Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s doctor and in the burgeoning friendship between Cruise and his rival-turned-friend played by Michael Rooker. Scott’s film seeks to entertain and does so with gusto, which is too rare in 2026, since audience satisfaction is far from the minds of most film studios these days.

The plot charts the rise of Tom Cruise’s maverick racecar driver Cole Trickle (what a name). Car dealership tycoon Tim Daland (Randy Quaid) thinks he has what it takes to be a great driver, despite his inexperience, so he lures crew chief Harry Hogge (Robert Duvall) out of retirement to work with Cole and set him up to win the Daytona 500 at the end of the season. Harry knows Cole has potential—he is a great driver, after all—but he’s a hothead. Maybe, just maybe, with Harry’s guidance, and a little luck, he can become a champion.

From there, Days of Thunder plays all the hits of the classic sports movie. There are the early struggles, where Cole pushes the car too hard—NASCAR, it turns out, is all about pacing yourself so you don’t break your car or shoot your shot at the wrong moment. There’s the correction, where he starts to listen to Harry and has great success. There’s the rivalry with Michael Rooker’s Rowdy Burns, a championship racer who’s rough with Cole on the course. There’s the great flameout during a bravura sequence set during the Firecracker 400 at Daytona, where both Cole and Rowdy are seriously injured.

Every sports movie needs an injury part, where the hero has to take a step back and re-evaluate whether he has what it takes to make it to the top. Of course he does, but he only gets there by bonding with his rival and finding a woman to make him honest, in this case, Nicole Kidman’s Dr. Claire Lewicki—the fact that she’s his doctor crosses all manner of ethical lines when viewed from 2026, but the movie launches over those like a ramp on a racetrack.

Fuelled with love and friendship, Cole comes back better than ever. The problem: Tim has replaced him with another driver, Russ Wheeler (Cary Elwes), who was meant to be a placeholder but who is so good at racing, he keeps the job even when Cole returns to action. So Cole has got a new rival and his old rival, Rowdy, has to get surgery even though it means he might never race again. We get the dark night of the soul where Cole has to convince his friend to save his life at the cost of his career and where he himself must rise to the occasion to challenge the new enemy armed with nothing but his closest friends and a last-minute car offered by Rowdy.

You know where it all leads—triumph—and that’s the beauty of such a work. It helps that each part is played with such earnest energy. During its release in 1990, Days of Thunder got a lot of flak for copying elements of Top Gun—the roguish pilot/driver, the professional relationship that turns to romance, the hardass rival who becomes his best friend, the tragic crashes and the triumphant successes. What this criticism misses, especially with the distance of decades, is that many of the elements are better in Days of Thunder than those in Top Gun. Nicole Kidman is an upgrade over Kelly McGillis (Cruise must’ve thought so himself at the time considering they got married). Robert Duvall is a better mentor than Tom Skerrit. No one can top Val Kilmer’s Iceman, but Michael Rooker comes damn close. Tom Cruise also played some variation on Maverick throughout most of the 1980s and 90s, so the overall approach is what people expected of a Tom Cruise movie at the time.

This is all to say that critiquing Days of Thunder due to its familiar beats misses the point: it’s a blast precisely because it leans into these beats, casts the film with an assortment of great movie stars and character actors, and executes the formula with such visceral excellence. Speaking of the cast, everyone plays who you’d expect given the period, but it’s such a pleasure to watch such a stacked cast. Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall and Nicole Kidman get most of the attention in retrospect, but Michael Rooker and Randy Quaid and even Cary Elwes as the smarmy final villain are great. Heck, John C. Reilly even shows up as one of the pit crew. The movie really delights in its performers.

Tony Scott also directs the hell out of this picture. It seems the key to Hollywood mainstream success is to execute conventional stories with the formal precision and innovation expected of the great arthouse masters. There are two moments that epitomize just how much visual fun Scott has here and how much textual meaning he adds into scenes, whether quiet or kinetic.

The first is at the end of the scene where we first meet Cole. It’s not pivotal in terms of action, but it shows such a confidence in shot construction and editing that it’s almost breathtaking when viewed from 2026. After Cole does a successful test run at the Daytona track in Rowdy’s car (with Rowdy watching from atop Cole’s motorcycle), Cole races into where the pit crew are waiting. Scott cuts to a POV shot from the front of the car, low to the ground, with Rowdy on the motorcycle dead ahead. The camera races with the car towards the bike, and just as you think it’s going to hit, Scott cuts to a side profile shot of the car stopping perfectly in front of Rowdy, a mere inch away, while the pit crew excitedly gathers around him. To top it all off, the backdrop is brilliantly lit up by the night sky in golden hues of orange, red, and yellow. It’s the Tony Scott sheen personified. What shot construction!

The second moment is the fateful crash scene at the Firecracker 400 where both Cole and Rowdy are severely injured. Throughout all the race sequences, Scott deftly mixes and matches test drivers with his stars, staged stunts with realistic wide shots of NASCAR races, so the verisimilitude is well established by the time we get to this pivotal race. So we get a furious blend of close-ups of Cruise and Rooker in the driver’s seats, wide shots racing along the blacktop of the track, insert cut-aways of cars darting into and out of view of the side mirrors, and the parallel cuts to the pit crew trying to support from the sidelines.

It’s classic action construction, but Scott adds a new element: a smokescreen caused by a damaged car down the track. Rowdy and Cole have to race close to the edge to get beyond the smoke, but it takes a leap of faith through the unknown. The smoky veil becomes a metaphorical one. Rowdy crosses first and Cole, finally ready to race into the unknown and embody the fearlessness of a NASCAR champion, follows. But Rowdy spins out and blocks Cole’s path, so when Cole punctures this smoke, Rowdy is waiting. The impact sends them both to hospital, with Cole T-boning Rowdy, sending his car flipping and flying through the air—clearly a real vehicle destroyed on screen for our amusement and amazement. It’s cool as hell and pivotal to the themes and character building.

There are many things in Days of Thunder that seem totally phony, but the filmmaking is never one of them. Like the crashed car during the Firecracker scene, it’s a movie that is a real feat of ingenuity for the sake of entertainment. The film is lively, pulsing, inventive, making every scene, every cliche, hit with such authority that you have no choice but to grin, whether you’re a NASCAR fan or not.

8 out of 10

Days of Thunder (1990, USA)

Directed by Tony Scott; written by Robert Towne, based on a story by Towne and Tom Cruise; starring Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman, Michael Rooker, Cary Elwes, John C. Reilly, Fred Dalton Thompson, Caroline Williams.