Kino Lorber’s Daylight 4K UHD had a strange trip to shelves. It arrived on March 11, 2025, then disappeared from sale almost immediately alongside Dante’s Peak. Kino never publicly explained the withdrawal, and theories ranged from licensing issues to technical concerns with the new masters. Whatever happened behind the scenes, Daylight finally resurfaced on August 18, 2026, giving Stallone’s tunnel disaster movie another shot at the light.

The movie itself had a much simpler beginning. Writer Leslie Bohem took inspiration from a 1949 Holland Tunnel fire he discovered in old issues of Life, while director Rob Cohen brought some personal experience to the material as a survivor of Boston’s 1979 Copley Plaza Hotel fire. Cohen pitched it to Stallone as a follow-up to Cliffhanger. Instead of dangling its star from a mountain, this one would attack him with claustrophobia, fire and several million gallons of water.

Fresh off the CGI-heavy Dragonheart, Cohen wanted to go the other direction and make an old-school disaster picture in the Airport tradition, leaning heavily on practical effects, miniatures and physical sets.

Kit Latura (Sylvester Stallone, Creed) once ran New York’s Emergency Medical Services but now drives a cab. He happens to be nearby when a getaway car crashes into a convoy of toxic-waste trucks inside the tunnel beneath the Hudson River. The resulting fireball seals both ends, trapping a group of survivors with the river above them and the air rapidly running out.

Among them are struggling playwright Madelyne Thompson (Amy Brenneman, Heat) and self-important adventurer Roy Nord (Viggo Mortensen, Green Book). Kit knows the tunnel better than almost anyone, so naturally he does the one thing everyone else is trying desperately not to do: he goes in.

That’s where Daylight is at its best. Kit’s descent past a massive ventilation fan remains a terrific piece of tension, and the movie keeps finding new ways to make fire, collapsing concrete and rising water feel like separate threats. It’s a disaster movie from the last days when Hollywood was still building a lot of its disasters by hand. The scale feels physical because so much of it actually was.

The trouble comes whenever everyone has time to talk. The screenplay leans hard into melodrama, the dialogue rarely gives anyone much personality, and several members of the supporting cast seem to be competing over who can panic the loudest. Stallone is considerably better. He keeps Kit more restrained than you might expect, playing him as a guy trying to stay useful rather than turning every rescue into an action-hero pose.

Stallone later suggested the premise was better than the finished movie, which feels a little harsh. Daylight knows exactly what kind of movie it is, even if it sometimes takes too long getting from one catastrophe to the next.

Critics weren’t especially kind in 1996. Roger Ebert gave it two stars and compared the experience to listening to an oldies station, while the film earned only about $33 million domestically against a much healthier worldwide total of nearly $159 million. It even escaped both of its Razzie nominations.

Three decades later, its weaknesses haven’t vanished, but its strengths have become easier to appreciate. As a rainy-night disaster movie full of miniatures, real fire, enormous sets and Sylvester Stallone fighting an entire river, it still knows how to put on a show.