SPEED
A film review by Phineas Narco
Copyright 1994 Phineas Narco
I can just imagine the pitch for the new movie SPEED at some Hollywood power lunch at Spago's: "Okay, picture IN THE LINE OF FIRE meets DIE HARD. A psycho bomber rigs a bus full of people so that if it falls below 50 MPH it explodes. We get Christian Slater or Keanu Reaves for the lead, you know, someone young and virile, he has to keep the bus running while trying to disarm the bomb." SPEED is pure junk food entertainment ... like a Snickers bar it's delicious and cloying when you're eating it, yet virtually devoid of substance, nutrition and credibility. After you've come down from the initial sugar rush you feel kind of empty and cheated, but only if you were expecting anything more from it.
That Spago power lunch HAD to have taken place at some point. DIE HARD meets IN THE LINE OF FIRE. Keanu's hair (which keeps getting shorter and shorter with each movie he makes--is he bald in LITTLE BUDDHA?) is close-cropped like Bruce Willis' in DIE HARD. Like IN THE LINE OF FIRE there's a lot of verbal sparring over the phone with the psycho and talk about "the game" and Keanu's partner (like Eastwood's partner) gets ... well, you know ... Unlike IN THE LINE OF FIRE, SPEED doesn't spend much time on things like character and plot development, it's too busy blowing things up ... and they blow up real good.
Keanu plays Jack Traven who works on a bomb squad and points his gun at every conceivable angle when entering a room while trying to eradicate the last remnants of his valley-boy accent from the BILL AND TED movies with a steady, macho baritone register ... along with Jeff Daniels, his partner and in the movie's opening they are trying to save an elevator full of people from plummeting thirty floors or so unless Dennis Hopper, our resident psychopath, gets a few million dollars delivered to him. We're asked to believe that the police forget to check the freight elevators in one of which Hopper's hanging out (how he plans to collect the money, due in a few minutes, from this clandestine vantage point is not explained). Well, our belief is suspended about as well as the elevator and it soon comes crashing down as well but not before they rescue the hostages. Reeves and Daniels corner the psycho in the basement discovering that he's taped a dozen sticks of dynamite to his torso all ready to blow.... Keanu utters such inanities as: "Give it up, you've got nowhere to go!" while Hopper takes Daniels hostage with a gun--why I don't know since he can blow all three of them to Kingdom come. Why Keanu shoots Daniels in the leg is equally stupid, but then Hopper walks out the door (why he doesn't shoot both of them is anybody's guess) and there is a huge explosion on the other side. How in the world Hopper survives the explosion is simply never explained.... Well, that pretty much sets the tone for the film, full of action and would-be suspense, and utterly nonsensical.
The main part of the film, of course, concerns the bus that can't slow down or it will explode.... Matthew Broderick's buddy from FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF is one of the passengers, a tourist, sporting a deep tan, and spends most of the movie rolling his eyes and muttering to himself, probably wishing he was kicking a Ferrari through a plate glass window instead of being on the "wrong bus." There is some chemistry between Jack and Annie (Sandra Bullock) who takes over as driver of the runaway bus. Bullock is good here but as the movie wears on, our credulity is further stretched as their conversations become flirty and casual as she drives along hardly glancing at the speedometer or the road at some points.
Meanwhile Hopper is monitoring all this action, ostensibly, from the overhead television newscopters live footage on the local news. Later we find out he's monitoring the action in another way in another laughable revelation. Hopper isn't that great of a psycho, he concedes too much, he gives away too much information about himself in flagrant clues to his would be victims. We never *really* find out what Hopper's beef is. There's some talk about how he used to be a cop (again, echoes of IN THE LINE OF FIRE), how he lost a finger and got put into retirement and was pissed off cuz he got a gold watch. So what? Doesn't really add up to a motive for all the mayhem. Keanu snarls his lip while yelling things at him over the phone like: "I'm going to rip out your spine!" (They got this line from THE RUNNING MAN). Oh, please!
There are other problems. Never mind the fact that it would be logistically impossible to keep a bus at the speed limit on the Santa Monica freeway for almost any length of time... After a while they get onto a highway under construction only to find out that two miles ahead of them there is a fifty-foot stretch of highway that is simply not there. I almost laughed out loud at this sequence. I thought for a second that E.T. must be driving the bus because it literally *rises up* of its own accord like Peter Pan. We're not even given a long shot of the bus making the jump from what I can remember ... you see the bus take off then a shot of people screaming and being jostled around inside the bus then you see the bus landing and driving on. Perhaps some physics major can demonstrate the impossibility of that stunt, but you don't have to be one to see that the bus should have dropped like a stone. By this time I was wondering if they ever considered just busting the glass on that speedometer and holding the needle all the way to the right?
They make it to an airport to drive around and around the runways. There is a truly great sequence (a la RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK) where Keanu slides under the bus on a dolly while it speeds along coming dangerously close to becoming road pizza. This sequence just about had me jumping into the row behind me. I won't reveal the physical impossibility of how Keanu and Bullock exit the bus at the end but I could hear the audience members scoffing around me. "Yeah, right!"
Well, every good action movie nowadays has to have at least two climaxes and, of course, the obligatory mano-a-mano showdown and this is no exception. It takes place on the top of a subway car traveling underground and is derivative of SILVER STREAK in more ways than one.
SPEED seems to be another one in a long line of recent calculated blockbusters that Hollywood has been churning out a lot of lately along the lines of BATMAN RETURNS, CLIFFHANGER, JURASSIC PARK, and DEMOLITION MAN ... movies that visually are wonderful to look at, technically slick, expertly edited, yet also implausible, derivative and almost utterly devoid of substance or meaning. In terms of things like plot, character and acting, they're a mess. It's getting to the point where I expect there to be a movie called "BOOM!" released. BOOM! will be just two solid hours of explosions. No plot. No characters. No actors. No story. Just explosions and great visuals. Well, fortunately every so often Hollywood does come out with suspenseful thrilling gems like SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, THE FUGITIVE, and IN THE LINE OF FIRE ... movies that have wonderful performances, believable and engaging characters and events, and taut plot lines. SPEED is in a whole different ball park. It will make a *whole* lot of money this summer. It is a fun ride if you accept and expect it for the junk food entertainment that it is. However, it's not much beyond that.
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews