Speed: The 90s Best Action Movie
This review originally appeared in the June 6th and 7th edition of the Courier in Russellville, AR
The first time I heard about the movie Speed, it was a joke on Family Guy. Then, much later, the dog family in Bluey paid homage to it in an episode, but it wasn’t until last week that I watched it. The 1994 action-thriller has the kind of plot that would have made my sixteen-year-old wanna-be-cinephile eyes roll into the next week. It is achingly contrived and ridiculously premised. There’s a mad man terrorizing the city and if the bus goes below fifty miles-per-hour, it’s going to blow! It sounds hilarious and it is, but the action movie delivers on suspense, pyrotechnics, and all out charm in a refreshing way.
Can I say that a movie that’s thirty-two years old is refreshing? Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but I’m sticking to it. After two-decades of expanded universes spun up in CGI and layered with more CGI and plotlines from recycled intellectual properties more than fifty years old, this 90s throwback felt deliciously fresh.
The opening credits appear as Microsoft Word style graphics of all the big names zooming in and then disappearing. The background is a rolling backdrop descending down an elevator shaft. The shot is incredible, the elevator shaft industrial and clean, muted purples and blues, in an extended pan from the thirty-something floor to basement parking. The lines and rectangles of the mechanics have that flat, geometric appeal of good art deco, but dark and industrial.
“Wait, is this going to be a good movie?” I asked my partner. I wasn’t ready for a good movie. I thought it would be a ridiculous movie, a laughingstock cultural relic from the summer I turned three. Shows what I know. It was going to be a good movie and a romp; it was going to be goofy and suspenseful and delightful to watch.
“All I remember is the bus,” my partner shrugged. Speed had been part of the backdrop of his childhood. He remembered it was awesome and not much else.
The movie starts with a bang (well, a stab to the face) and does not stop. The movie’s madman bomber, Howard Payne, played by Denis Hopper, didn’t start with the bus. He’s originally got his eyes set on three million dollars in exchange for an elevator full of hostages. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling bomb squad agents! With all-star buddy-cop banter from Keanu Reeves and Jeff Daniels, Jack and Harry manage at the last possible moment to save the hostages and thwart the bomber’s plan. They are funny and engaging together, their banter breaking up the intensity of the situation.
The plotting and cadence are pitch perfect. The movie shows us just who Jack and Harry are under intense pressure, characterizing them as the action unspools, without dreary exposition.
Jack’s quick and determined thinking saves the day, but Howard manages to get away. There’s only a minor lull in the action for the award ceremony before we’re in the thick of it again. Howard’s a madman and expert bomber driven by a singular motive—money. That is, until Jack gets in his way. A bus blows up in Jack’s neighborhood and he’s running. He won’t stop again until the final scenes of the movie.
This first bus goes up without so much as a ransom note, an amuse-bouche for the explosions we’re going to get later, though I’m not sure why one explosion is straightforward if the next is going to be so complicated. I guess that’s that mad part of a madman. Besides, there’s not too much time to think about it. Jack’s running after the bus and then hijacking a car to chase after it while we’re getting to know the people inside the bus. There’s our bus driver Sam, played by Hawthorne James, there’s Alan Ruck as a talkative tourist, an older lady, a construction driver, a kid looking shifty, and then there’s Annie Porter, played by Sandra Bullock. You know you’re going keep your eyes on Annie, who is instantly enchanting, even if she is smoking a cigarette the first time we see her.
Once Jack’s on the bus things go (even more) awry. The bus driver’s shot and Sandra’s Annie is playing stunt driver. That’s where the B-plot of Annie and Jack’s flirtation starts, because the chemistry is honestly ridiculous, both in the quality of their performance together and given the circumstances on-screen.
The move has been moving at a breakneck speed but now we’re on the bus, the bomb’s been discovered, and Annie’s at the wheel. This is the movie as the movie is remembered. It’s not Annie’s fault at all, but there’s a lot of damage happening on the freeways and streets of LA. I was gripping my partner’s hand through it all. We took turns yelling at Annie to keep her eyes on the road, rather than on handsome Keanu, but the movie seems to ask for this kind of heckling, lets itself be in on the joke. While the tension is high and everyone keeps yelling inside the movie too, it’s broken up with humorous moments like Alan Ruck’s tourist playing phone relay for Keanu who has his head under the bus. Ruck’s haltingly translates Reeve’s foul language with great hesitation, changing the swears to a wholesome, “Oh, darn.”
The worst part of the movie, when they jump the shark by jumping a full bus over an incomplete freeway, is maybe also the best part of the movie. It’s ridiculous and of course impossible, but the movie winks at us, it doesn’t smirk. It’s easy to feel like it’s in on its own ridiculousness because it lets the outlandish thing stand on its own, no contrived explaining. It doesn’t think it’s dumb or that we’re dumb either, but our suspension of disbelief is as powerful as the suspension of the bus as it sails fifty feet.
Actually, that’s not the best part of the movie. The best part of the movie is what happens after they’ve managed (finally) to safely evacuate the bus. Annie and Jack have exited with the bus still running, accelerator jammed down, and they go in absolute style, lugeing beneath the wheels of the bus. It’s not fireworks as they hold each other but a whole Boeing 707 going up in flames. Bus hits plane, kaboom. It’s beautiful, really. No skimping on the scene, the director gets his money’s worth with multiple angles and long, lingering shots of it burning. I’m not even a blow’em up girlie and I still cheered the sight. I think it felt something like the delight of watching the choreography of that Yung Lean video that went around recently, or those polka-dotted French guys, Angine de Poitrine, playing guitar like aliens; here is something real. Here is risk and work and those flames are the reward. I know the explosion was mediated by budget and advisors and experts and all those things, for which I’m glad. No one got hurt in real life! Now look at it go.
Not to spoil a thirty-year-old movie, but the bad guy dies while the good guy gets in another questionable one-liner. Even though there’s still minutes of pure tension left at this point, Jack gets the girl, I promise. But there’s more crashing and smashing before they make it out of the mess.
Talking about movie budgets is always weird, because what do you mean that $30 million is mid-budget? It’s money I can’t imagine so it all feels pretend, but to put it into perspective, Speed would go on to make about ten times that around the world. Or, to put it another way, the entirety of Speed—exploding plane and all—cost the same as about half of a season of Game of Thrones, or about a seventh of an average Marvel movie today. It was wildly successful commercially and critically.
It’s everything an action movie should be, including seriously aware of how unserious it is. It is still trying to do a good job anyways. The movie launched Sandra Bullock’s career and cemented Keanu Reeves as an action star. The only tarnish to all this shining legacy is that they couldn’t leave well enough alone. Speed 2 is set on a cruise ship. The consensus is that they followed up one of the greatest action movies of all time with one of the worst. So, in a way, it’s nice to know that all this sequel chasing isn’t a new problem. But who knows? Maybe I’ll give it a try sometime. Or maybe I’ll wait to see if the Bluey family does it first. They’ve always had good taste.
