#88 Speed 2: Cruise Control (Wes)

#88 Speed 2: Cruise Control

In this list there are movies that make me sad because I have to watch them. Not because they are tragically beautiful like Into the Wild or Grave of the Fireflies, but because I’ve successfully avoided watching them since they were released. Speed 2 was the first of these movies.

Annie (Sandra Bullock) and her policeman boyfriend, Officer Alex Shaw (Jason Patric) decide to go on a cruise holiday together. Unfortunately the cruise ship is also the target of John Geiger (William Dafoe), who hacks into the ships autopilot. After evacuating most of the passengers, he makes it so it so the ship can’t be steered or slowed down. As Alex, Annie and the crew try to get control of the ship, they realise that it’s headed straight for an oil tanker and director Jan de Bont realises this film is headed straight to the bargain bins. 

Speed was a great movie. Dennis Hopper was a great villain, Keanu Reeves played Ted (Theodore) Logan grown up as a cop really well and Sandra Bullock was cool and kooky and everything you want Sandra Bullock to be in a movie. It had charm and it had a good chemistry between it’s characters.

But the best thing about the movie though, was the bus not being allowed to slow under 50mph or it would trigger a bomb. Such a great concept, that even The Muppets Tonight parodied it when Sandra Bullock was the guest star (the theatre will be blown up if the ratings drop below 50). It was tense and exciting, but most of all, it was fun. There were so many ways to make things difficult for this bus that it really was one of those movies where you feel genuine exhilaration. Speed 2 was set on a boat.

Not even a speedboat (until right at the end), but a cruise ship…

What was Jan De Bont thinking when he came up with the story for this movie? If you look at the Wiki page for this movie, then you’ll learn that hundreds of ideas were given to him for this sequel. The screenwriter for Speed (Graham Yost – who wasn’t involved in this movie), had a great sounding idea about a plane flying through the Andes mountains, but it can’t go higher than 10,000 feet. Father Ted parodied Speed with a milk float that couldn’t go under 4mph (it's hilarious, watch a clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L90BduGKuTo). Writing this I came up with the idea of a train or something. Basically ANYTHING BUT A CRUISE SHIP!

I guess the only good thing about this boat idea, was locking it on a set course. If they’d had a plot similar to the original Speed and they just had maintain a certain velocity, but could go anywhere, then it would be a case of pointing yourself at Ireland and hoping you don’t run out of petrol.

The fact that this film was released the same year as Titanic, makes it even worse. To me it seems like one of those movies where they try to ride the theme of something that’s popular that year (much like film studio The Asylum does). However, in Titanic when the ship went too fast there was tension and tragedy. By the time something actually happens in this movie, you’ve lost all interest and you really don’t care if the ship blows up, or if the villain gets away with it all.

The lack of acting doesn’t really help matters in this movie either. I normally really like Willian Dafoe, but even he can’t save this turgid mess. His maniacal grinning may have served him well as Norman Osbourne/The Green Goblin, but here it just doesn’t work so well.  Sandra Bullock is kooky, but just a bit flat and she doesn’t have that same charm as she did in the first movie. Jason Patric gets out-acted by a boat.

What makes things worse is the fact that Jason Patric and Sandra Bullock are the worst onscreen couple since Jabba the Hutt and Princess Leia. There’s such a lack of chemistry that you could be forgiven for thinking you was looking at the list of classes available to take at Hogwarts.

This film is slow, badly acted and has a script that sounds like it was written in crayon. So that’s now sixteen years of blissful ignorance of EXACTLY how bad this movie is flushed slowly down the toilet. 

Even Keanu Reeves turned this film down when he read the script, and he was in The Matrix Revolutions. I think that should tell you all you need to know.