Film Appreciation - The Whim of a Madman

Cody Hamman takes a ride with 1994's Speed for Film Appreciation.

20th Century Fox's 1988 action movie Die Hard pit its hero up against a group of thieves who had taken over a high-rise office building, and the success of that film led to a slew of action movies that also had their heroes beat the odds in a confined location. These movies tended to be referred to as "Die Hard in a --" or "Die Hard on a --" (insert location in place of those dashes) films; for example, the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege is Die Hard on a battleship, the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Sudden Death is Die Hard in a hockey stadium. Etc. In 1994, Fox was so keen to replicate the success they had with Die Hard and Die Hard 2 (a.k.a. Die Hard in an airport), they offered Die Hard director John McTiernan the chance to direct their film Speed, which has been described as Die Hard on a bus. McTiernan turned down the offer, passing the job over to his Die Hard cinematographer Jan De Bont. So Speed did get that Die Hard pedigree, just not in the way Fox originally hoped for.

De Bont pulled it off. Speed isn't as popular as Die Hard, but it is often ranked highly as one of the classics of the action genre. The screenplay was written by Graham Yost, and Yost's work received an uncredited polish from Joss Whedon. Once you know Whedon worked on it, a lot of lines will jump out at you as something that sounds Whedon-esque. 

Revisiting Speed twenty-six years later, it's kind of striking to see how quaint it is by today's standards. The big, standout moment that everyone was talking about during the summer of '94 comes when the aforementioned bus has to jump a fifty foot gap in the roadway. Action entertainment features much bigger, more outlandish stuff these days, but in '94 this bus jump - which was a real stunt - was making viewers drop their jaws. Watching this moment now, it's surprising to see that the coverage of it is not the greatest. It got the job done at the time, though.

The film starts in a rather fitting way for a movie following in the footsteps of Die Hard: with trouble in a high-rise office building. In this case, a bomb-making madman named Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) has blown out the cables on an elevator, leaving the elevator and the office workers inside stuck around the thirtieth floor. If the city of Los Angeles doesn't hand over $3 million dollars, Howard will detonate another bomb in the elevator shaft that will send the elevator crashing to the ground.

We meet our hero when the LAPD SWAT team arrives. That's Jack Traven, played by a beefed-up, stoic Keanu Reeves with his hair cut quite short. Jack is partnered with Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels), who has clearly taken on a mentor role in his life, as Jack must be relatively new to SWAT. Harry quizzes Jack about scenarios they might find themselves in while at work to see how Jack would hypothetically handle them, which is how we get one of the most famous lines from the movie: "Pop quiz, hot shot." Howard's plan is thwarted when Jack figures out exactly what he's up to, and that he's actually inside the building as well, set up in a freight elevator. The situation at the high-rise ends with Howard appearing to blow himself up... but that's not the case. Howard is still alive, and he is soon back to cause Jack more trouble.

30 minutes in, Jack finds out that Howard has planted a bomb on a city bus. That bomb will be activated once the bus hits the speed of 50 miles per hour, and will detonate if it ever drops below 50 after that. This is a situation Jack will be dealing with for a full hour of the film's 116 minute running time. This is why the movie happens to be called Speed, and it's a great concept, because of course the bus hits 50 before Jack can even reach it, and then he has to make sure it stays above 50 for an extended period of time. Long enough to figure out how to either defuse the bomb that's stuck to the bottom of it, or get the passengers off the vehicle so it can be allowed to blow up in a safe place (something Howard specifically warns against doing), in a city that's known for having a lot of traffic.

Traffic isn't the only thing the bus passengers have to worry about, as the filmmakers threw as many complications as they could at Traven - who, of course, gets on the bus himself. Missing sections of a freeway that's under construction, a gas leak, hard turns, a driver who has been accidentally shot, Howard finding a way to keep an eye on what's happening... There are a lot of issues to overcome. Once the professional driver has been injured, a passenger has to step up and take the wheel, and this is a role that really helped blow up the career of Sandra Bullock. Her character Annie, who recently lost her driver's license, is mouthy, loud, and frequently annoying as far as I'm concerned, but she's also entertaining and likeable overall. And it's no surprise that, over the course of their crazy day together, Annie also becomes Jack's love interest.

Daniels is endearing in the role of Harry Temple, Joe Morton does strong work as Harry and Jack's superior Captain "Mac" McMahon, and Hopper got to play unhinged in his own unique way as Howard Payne. There are also some memorable characters on board the bus, including Hawthorne James as that injured bus driver, Beth Grant as a skittish passenger, Carlos Carrasco as a fellow who is really named Ortiz but gets referred to as Gigantor, and Alan Ruck as a tourist who provides some laughs. Glenn Plummer also makes a fun cameo as a man who helps Jack get on the bus.

 

The bus situation ends in the most spectacular way possible, but that's not the end of the action in the movie. The climax takes place on a speeding subway train, a sequence that always felt tacked on and repetitious to me because Jack and Annie end up facing the same issue on this train as they had faced on the bus not much earlier: the track is under construction, and the train is hurtling toward an unfinished section. That's the sort of thing that would be questionable even if it showed up in a too-familiar sequel, let alone being in the same movie where the bus jump happened.

But despite Speed repeating the same trick before the end credits roll, it is a really good action movie that still holds up to this day. I watched this movie many times when I was a kid, and even had the poster on display in my bedroom for a while - I remember hanging that up on the same afternoon I watched the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead for the first time. I watched Speed in the theatre with my mom, at home with my brother, I owned it on VHS and later upgraded to DVD. And it's how I learned that people say "F*ck me" as a curse. That's Jack's reaction when he gets a look at the bomb on the bus, and that line baffled me because up to that point I had only heard people use "F*ck you" as an insult, never saying that about themselves. I didn't get it, why was he insulting himself? Give me a break, I was only ten when this was released.