A catastrophic explosion seals both ends of a heavily traveled tunnel, trapping a group of survivors beneath a river with fire, flooding, and collapsing concrete closing in around them. Their only hope is a man willing to enter the disaster while everyone else is desperately trying to get out. From there it’s pure 90s disaster movie insanity, with seemingly every possible thing that can go wrong doing exactly that. Next week we’re reviewing a survival thriller about claustrophobia, questionable engineering, and the apparently terrible decision to drive through a tunnel.

Commissioned by: Rob H. • 8/8/26

• Year: 1996
• Budget: About $80 million
• Box Office: About $159 million worldwide
• Awards: Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Editing
• Fun Facts: Sylvester Stallone reportedly received around $17.5 million for the movie, making him one of Hollywood’s highest paid actors at the time. It was directed by Rob Cohen, who later directed The Fast and the Furious. Stallone’s son Sage appears in the film as one of the trapped survivors. Although set inside New York’s Holland Tunnel, much of the enormous tunnel environment was recreated on soundstages at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where filmmakers could flood, burn, and destroy the sets without actually shutting down Manhattan.