Rubbing is racing.

Days of Thunder — 3/5

Wildly inconsistent movie with incoherent character shifts. Feels like five hours of movie stuffed into a 1h47m runtime. But man, does this thing have a quality. A quality, and the best movie names in a 50-year radius. Russ Wheeler. Rowdy Burns. Cole Trickle. These names are not only ridiculous, but they are accurate to this silly sport. They are NASCAR drag names. Which I suppose I'll use as a lead-in to a subject I've been wanting to discuss: Tom Cruise makes male musicals. The feelings are overwrought, but they're packaged up in fashionable, costumed men. The musical set piece, of course, becomes an action set piece where the characters work through their issues by banging into each other. There's a scene where Cole is having PTSD, and the only way to get over it is to speed through some burning cars. It's beautiful and stupid, but he did it: he got over his mental block by driving really fast. Just replace that with 'singing a song about feelings' and you've got your traditional musical but, you know, this isn't as gay as that, but also, guys, it really kind of is. I know Quentin Tarantino made the point that 'Top Gun' is about a man coming to terms with his homosexuality and yes, maybe, but I think these movies are more about the inability of men to do 'gay shit' (be emotional) without explicitly doing 'male shit.' It's okay to slap asses only after they've hit a dinger, dunked a ball, and won the Daytona 500. And the backdrop of all of this is a fucking lit Hans Zimmer soundtrack, so the music's still there, honcho. I think Tom Cruise's output of the last 20 years has mostly forgotten that fucking lit music is the backbone to his male musicals. This movie ain't great but, also, I fucking love this shit. I love the hair, I love the fashion, Robert Duvall puts in an all-timer performance, and then you've got Tony Scott with a grimy fucking male aesthetic. Everything feels like a hot day after a thunderstorm. Like I say, it's got a quality.