In 2009, Quentin Tarantino named Jan de Bont’s Speed as one of his 20 favorite movies released between 1992 and 2009, “and that’s even discounting the last 20 minutes of the movie, which, basically, once the bus blows up, the movie’s over. It might be easy to take Speed for granted now, but if you actually remember when Speed came out [and] what it was like to sit in the movie theater as that bus was going down the road—there really have been few exhilaration movies quite like it.”
Tarantino was offered to direct Speed, but chose to spend six months in Amsterdam writing Pulp Fiction instead; de Bont, master cinematographer of Die Hard, Basic Instinct, Flatliners, I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, Ruthless People, All the Right Moves, and Leonard pt. 6 got the chance to begin his own directorial career. A prolific cinematographer, de Bont ended up stalled as a director in Hollywood, following Speed two years later with Twister, another blockbuster, and then 1997’s Speed 2: Cruise Control, one of the most reviled and unsuccessful sequels in recent movie history. He directed only one more movie in the 1990s, The Haunting, and his last studio film as director was the second Tomb Raider movie in 2003.
Twister is a better title and poster than a movie—in fact, it merely reinforces the argument already made in Speed that CGI will never be as exciting and practical stunts and effects. When Speed came out in 1994, computer generated images were still new to Hollywood, with James Cameron blowing the doors open with T2: Judgment Day; close behind were Steven Spielberg’s massive Jurassic Park, and John Carpenter’s anything but massive Memoirs of an Invisible Man. By the turn of the millennium, few if any Hollywood movies were made with the practical fidelity of Speed, and like the last silent films, it stands as the peak of a particular art form right before its forced extinction. Tarantino’s right: there hasn’t been another movie like Speed in the 32 years since its release, not even Mad Max: Fury Road, an overrated and inert fantasy movie with zero relationship to our world and zero sense of cinematic geography. A big part of what makes Speed remarkable is that it’s set in a real city, in a real bus, with recognizable characters and behaviors. I’ve no idea who’s who or what’s what in Fury Road—how can I care?
Compare that to the opening elevator rescue sequence in Speed, when Keanu Reeves, Jeff Daniels, Joe Morton, and their peers in the LAPD thwart a terrorist attack by mad sicko Dennis Hopper. He sends an office elevator full of half a dozen people plummeting down just so he can dangle them and demand an absurd amount of money. Reeves, Daniels, and co. stabilize the elevator and pull each person off one by one (including Patrick “Winkie’s” Fischler) between floors; the elevator’s barely hanging on, and each person escaping risks a nightmare death, ripped between floors. The final woman is too nervous to cross, but Reeves holds out his hand between the floor and the perilously close elevator top. “I’VE GOT YOU!” The elevator sways and buckles, and the woman just barely makes it out with her legs intact before it slams into the basement. This sequence alone blows most action movies out of the water, and we haven’t even gotten to the bus yet.
Once the hostages are safe, Reeves realizes that Hopper must be in the same building. Daniels, skeptical, goes along to investigate; one moment Reeves turns a corner, and Hopper has Daniels with a gun to his head. “Shoot the hostage,” Daniels mouths to Reeves, and shoot him he does—in the upper thigh. Daniels lives but Hopper gets away. “You shot me!” “You told me to!” They both get medals, but only Daniels gets a limp and a desk job.
Unfortunately for them, Hopper isn’t finished. Now he wants revenge: this bomb fetishist reintroduces himself one day by blowing up a bus right in front of Reeves, killing the driver but distracting the cops from his real target: a bus full of people “with enough C4 strapped to it to blow a hole in the earth.” The film’s famous premise is outlined to Reeves by Hopper over the phone: “If that bus goes below 50 miles per hour, it explodes.” Reeves and passenger Sandra Bullock have to keep the bus going at all costs, running rampant on freeways finished and incomplete, eventually ending up at LAX where they can drive in circles until they have an opportunity to refuel.
The bus chase, the most exhilarating and sustained action set piece of the 1990s, is often misremembered as the entirety of the film, but there’s about 20 minutes before and after, set in an elevator and the subway, respectively. The subway? I was sure that the movie ended in an elevator, with Hopper, Bullock, and Reeves battling it out one last time, but that all happens on the subway. The subway?! Forget “Walking in LA,” who takes the subway in LA? Watching Speed at home, it’s easy to check out once the bus blows up, but in a packed theater, the excitement is sustained from bus to …subway… and if anyone noticed that De Bont and screenwriter Graham Yost reused the “WE’RE OUT OF ROAD” stunt from the middle of the movie, well, it didn’t stop them from hooting and hollering.
I went to a revival of Point Break a couple of years ago, and the crowd was similar, but that movie is much closer to the homoerotic bro vibe of Top Gun than the lean, mean pure action cinema of Speed. Reeves and Bullock have chemistry, but there are no love scenes (was there even a kiss?), and their work is overwhelmingly real and thoroughly engaging because they’re on a speeding bus/subway. Even in the much-derided sequel, 1997’s Speed 2: Cruise Control, de Bont uses far more practical sets, effects, and stunts, while dabbling in CGI, which denudes whatever power the sequel might’ve had (but casting Jason Patric in place of Reeves might’ve killed it in the crib). Still, 95 minutes of disaster movie bluster does culminate in a thrilling sequence where a very slow moving cruise ship crashes into the island of Saint Martin, a five-minute set piece that cost $25 million, still the largest and most expensive “stunt” ever filmed. It doesn’t let up, going deeper into the island than you’d ever expect, but by the time it hits, with just 20 minutes left in the movie, there’s no way to recover the goodwill squandered by what’s come before.
You could forgive writing out Reeves’ character, and you might’ve even gotten an alright disaster movie with Patric as the male lead, but why so much bloat? Speed 2 isn’t a lean action thriller, but part of the mid-1990s disaster movie revival characterized by Volcano, Dante’s Peak, Independence Day, and de Bont’s own Twister. There are guest stars and cameos that suggest this is a long running and beloved franchise like James Bond or even Die Hard—no. If a sequel to Speed had to be made, it needed a different title. You could keep the cruise ship and the Saint Martin stunt, but cut the fat and let Willem Dafoe, an adequate replacement for Hopper as the villain, chase Bullock on a jet ski while Patric futzes with knobs in the control deck.
In a making-of featurette included on the Speed 2 DVD, Dafoe talks about how “this kind of movie is acting at its purest, most essential form: you’re moving, and acting, and doing without thinking about it, and that comes through.” (Few actors could say this without sounding like an idiot windbag, but Dafoe is a rare bird). This is what makes the original Speed one of the best action movies ever made; I’ve always wondered why the sequel was met with so much hostility. I assumed it was bad, and it is, but the vitriol is more understandable when you see the first Speed in a full theater. Two days later, Speed 2 feels like an insult; so for those who waited three years for another awesome action film, it must’ve been devastating. No wonder de Bont’s career never recovered. Even Bullock got caught in the curl—she didn’t have another hit until 2000’s Miss Congeniality. Reeves was smart to stay out of it, but Fox was so pissed at him for not doing it, that they smeared their own star, cultivating the “Keanu is an idiot” perception and buying tons and tons of negative press for his band Dogstar.
And then The Matrix came out in 1999, and all was forgiven.
If Speed is under-appreciated now, it’s likely because of the failure of the sequel and the subsequent hits made by Reeves and Bullock, movies that were even bigger than Speed, less lean but also less powerful.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM