AllMovie

This somewhat amusing low-budget disaster movie recalls the mid-'70s tradition of The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, but with a fraction of the budget and on a considerably smaller scale. Which is to say it is not for the masses. B-movie fans who know and like cornball cheese when they see it may find some of Daybreak (evidently named such to echo Sylvester Stallone's 1996 trapped-in-a-tunnel epic Daylight) worth a hoot, if for no other reason than to see Ted McGinley chop a hole in a water main to put out a fire -- clever -- but then realize he's created an unstoppable torrent that's going to drown them all. Whoops. The backstories of the disparate characters stuck in the hole with Dillan -- the rape victim, the protective tough guy with the model girlfriend, the computer geek too smart for his own good -- are adequately developed in the beginning, and the dangers they face once the tunnel collapses are suitably rendered, given the budget limitations (the blurry photography that indicates the earthquake is, um, different). Not bad, with just enough thrills to keep things moving until someone comes along with the ultimate brain-dead disaster film: "Glacier! The Movie."