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.