Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Jason Patric, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison

Have I Seen It Before: Never. It’s always hung out there as some sort of ominous chore from the summer of 1997*, and I’ve missed it for this long.

Did I Like It: The movie presents a fundamental critical question: Is it the wretched, ill-considered sequel which simultaneously no one requested, and which sent de Bont’s career on a decade-long nosedive just as it was starting to get off the ground? Or is it the underappreciated gem which brazenly sported that peak 90s movie imprimatur: “Two Thumbs Up!” ~ Siskel & Ebert.

There are moments where the film does have the same breathless charm of its predecessor. Divorce it from any other context, and one could be forgiven for thinking it is certainly above average for an action movie of its age. Bullock is at the peak of her charms. Dafoe is giving us just a taste of his movie baddie skills, but it is a pretty good taste. Mark Mancina does the score, and while he is absolutely no Hans Zimmer, Jerry Goldsmith, or (hilarious even to bring him up in the same breath) John Williams, he has a singular 90s movie action charm that people like Harold Faltermeyer brought to the table ten years earlier, and Steve Jablonsky or Ramin Djiwandi did ten years later.

In short, you’re likely to get your money’s worth out of the movie, depending on how much money you spent on the endeavor. So, maybe that doesn’t apply to 20th Century Fox.

And yet…

The movie does lose one pretty quickly in its climax. A bus keeps moving and with some speed, but the cruise ship always seems improbably slow. That feels like something that should have buffed out in a screenplay that wasn’t written as quickly as possible, because the PC they were typing on would explode if it went below a certain amount of pages per hour. Now there’s an idea. It’s also probably a victim of its own time, coming six months before the cruise ship disaster movie to end all cruise ship disaster movies.

But let’s not kid ourselves, the real problem is all over this thing. I mentioned that the script seemed to be rushed. With all that extra time they saved writing as fast as possible, you would think the production would have been able to do some more serious work on their film when Keanu passed. Instead, Jason Patric plays some guy who is a hot-shot LAPD officer with more bravery than sense… He’s playing Keanu’s character. A control-F and a couple of lines about this being a new guy was all they could manage. It makes the whole film seem like the type of garment you buy on vacation. It never quite fits right when you get it home, and everyone looking at it can kind of tell it was a misguided decision.

So the answer to the big question lands—as most answers to profound questions usually do—somewhere in the middle.

*Is there are more disappointing summer of movies out there. Between The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Batman & Robin (1997), franchises were laid low. Even with Men in Black (1997) things were a bit on the ho-hum, and we didn’t get a really memorable film out of the year until Titanic (1997) and that came out in December.

Twister (1996)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cary Elwes

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. When your family gets HBO for the first time in late 1996, you almost had to watch it. It was the law. I’m sort of sad that I didn’t catch it in the theater, as my memory includes a screening of the film at the Admiral Twin Drive in here in town had to be cut short due to—you guessed it—marital discord between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

That’s what the movie is about, right?

Did I Like It: This has got to be one of the flimsiest, silliest blockbuster films to exist, and somehow, almost kind of work at the same time. The marriage subplot is so thin that both viewers and the movie itself decide to pretty much forget about it before the third act.

The movie makes a mad scramble for an antagonist. One would think the tornadoes would be enough bad guy for a movie… about tornadoes. There’s even a moment, right at the film’s climax where I think we are supposed to believe the probes contained within Dorothy actually killed the final tornado? Was this the same tornado that killed Jo’s (Hunt) father? But it isn’t enough, there has to be a cadre of black hats, or rather SUVs. 

One might point to the special effects as worth a view, but I think the one-two punch of seeing it on television, combined with the fact that it has been 25 years since the film was released, even those moments have grown tame.

What more is there? There aren’t that many movies that take place in the place I came from, to say nothing of action movies. There’s also a certain dopey charm in the storm chasers. Sure, if you forced me to come up with the names other than Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, and that one guy who I’m fairly sure disappears before Paxton’s fiancée excuses herself from the proceedings. They’re a fun bunch and I have a vague recollection of there being development of a sequel in the years since. What would that have even looked like? Maybe they go after hurricanes? Or snow flurries. Yep. I can see the poster now. Twister 2: Snow Flurries. Released in 1999. Bill Paxton returns; Helen Hunt couldn’t be bothered. In that universe, the Twister saga displaces The Fast and The Furious. 

One shudders. I just won’t growl. That should be left to the tornadoes.

Speed (1994)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels

Have I Seen it Before: Certainly. Several times. Hell, the title of one of my upcoming books is a reference to the film.

Did I Like It: We could fill the entire bandwidth of the various streaming services several times over with the clones of Die Hard (1988) that were produced in the ten-fifteen years after that film’s release. Many of them are truly bad. More than a few of them beg an investigation as to why they even exist in the first place.

Then there’s Speed.

Every piece of Speed fits together. That is not to say any moment of it is believable, but I have a hard time picking a moment from the film that feels incongruous with any of the other parts. One might say that the film really ends when the passengers get off the bus, and the movie definitely runs out of narrative when Howard Payne (Hopper—oh, sweet, sweet, Hopper*) loses his head. But these are nitpicks from a film that ages far better than some of the contemporary films, like The Rock (1996) or Bad Boys (1995), or really any of Michael Bay’s films, now that I’ve had a minute to think about it.

I will say that this film rests squarely in the least-engaging (although not entirely un-engaging) period in the screen career of Keanu Reeves. He has tried to shed the early exuberance of a Ted “Theodore” Logan, and is content to be merely earnest as all get-out. He’ll work through this period and become the shy near-Buddha we all know and love today, but is any character in an action movie from this era anything more than a prop designed to move plot forward? Just ask Jason Patric.

*Come to think of it, both of my upcoming books have some pretty direct lines into this movie. Maybe in the far flung future, people will refer to this as my “Dennis Hopper period” and be supremely disappointed when they realize what that really means.