The Summer of '94 Wasn't Supposed to Be the Summer of 'Speed'. Here's How it Happened.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The plot is absurdly simple: A mad man has rigged an LA bus with a bomb; if the bus drops below 50 miles per hour, the bomb will go off, killing everyone on it; he wants $3.7 million in cash. And yet, this barebones set-up resulted in what I’d argue is the most perfect action movie of the ‘90s. Released 27 years ago, Jan de Bont’s white-knuckle workout, Speed, entered the 1994 summer blockbuster season well below anyone’s radar. If anyone talked about it at all before it hit theaters, it was usually in the dismissive shorthand of “that Die Hard on a bus movie.” But thanks to its unlikely leads, its deliriously unhinged villain, and its breathless, unrelenting, what-next pacing, Speed soon snowballed into the crowd-pleaser of the year. Here are eight reasons why…
Because summer ’94 wasn’t supposed to be the summer of Speed
After Jaws kicked off the era of the modern blockbuster on June 20, 1975, summer became the de facto spot on the calendar when the biggest, loudest, and often dumbest Hollywood movies were rolled out into theaters. The summer of ’94 was no exception. And yet, as May approached, no one in the industry expected Fox’s $30-million bomb-on-a-bus flick, Speed, to be the phenomenon it would become. Instead, Tinseltown was betting its chip stack on The Crow, Beverly Hills Cop III, Blown Away, The Shadow, True Lies, The Client, and Clear and Present Danger. Don’t get me wrong, some of those movies, like True Lies, are decent. But most were pretty disappointing for one reason or another. In other words, the absence of an absolute heavyweight left the door wide open for a sleeper like Speed to sneak in. Had it arrived a couple of years earlier or a couple of years later, there’s a good chance that audiences would have been too busy with Terminator 2 or The Rock to give ‘the bus movie’ a chance. Speed opened on the same day as the sure-fire hit, City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold. And perhaps the biggest surprise of the summer was that when all the receipts were tallied by Labor Day, City Slickers II had made $43 million and Speed had racked up $350 million.
Sandra Bullock’s ‘A Star is Born’ moment
Before Speed, Bullock wasn’t on anyone’s A-list. She’d basically just been in the lightweight rom-com Love Potion No. 9 and hired as the wobbly third wheel in the Stallone-Snipes misfire, Demolition Man. But playing Annie Porter in Speed would turn the actress overnight into America’s Next Sweetheart. And looking at her performance nearly three decades later, it’s easy to see why: Yes, Keanu Reeves is the can-do action hero of the movie, but Bullock is its Everywoman hero—she acts the way you or I would hope to act if trapped in the same situation. Fittingly, fate plays a role in her heroism, as she races after LA bus 2525, which unbeknownst to her is loaded with explosives. It turns out that Annie has recently had her driver’s license revoked for…speeding! As the terror mounts on the bus and its driver is accidentally shot, she’s the one who has to get behind the wheel and make sure to keep the speedometer from dipping below 50. She’s crucial to the plot, brave, sarcastic, scared, and funny. In other words, she’s Sandra Bullock. We never doubt for a second that she and Keanu will manage to get out of this thing in one piece, but even she must have been surprised by the fact that after Speed became a huge box-office hit, she was being called “The New Julia Roberts.” Without a doubt, she’s the film’s secret weapon.
Keanu Reeves’ ‘An Action Star is Born” moment
Here’s a fun little nugget for you—the studio’s first choice to play Reeves’ daredevil SWAT bomb disposal hero was…Stephen Baldwin. No joke. Stephen fucking Baldwin! It’s hard to imagine it now because of how perfectly cast Reeves seems to have been in retrospect. But back in 1994, Reeves was neither a bankable name nor a bona fide action star. Sure, three years earlier he’d Johnny Utah-ed his way through Point Break. But Speed was the big turning point in his career—the critical crossroads that opened up a path that led to The Matrix and, later, the John Wick flicks. Reeves was 29 when Speed was released, and I don’t think he’s ever been better than he is as Jack Traven, the buzzcut badass whose quick-thinking heroics keep the film (and the bus) moving at its adrenalized clip. What’s most interesting about Reeves in Speed is that his performance seemed to formally announce that there had been a changing of the guard when it came to what a Hollywood action hero meant. Unlike the impossibly ripped celluloid supermen of the ‘80s like Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Reeves looked human, vulnerable, and life-size. With Speed (and Reeves), the Hollywood action movie slimmed down and became more visceral and real.
A deliciously bat-shit villain
Every action movie is only as good as its villain. I don’t care who your hero is, if he or she doesn’t have an outsized, colorful, and truly unhinged psycho on the business end of its good-vs-bad formula, it will never become truly iconic. Speed director Jan de Bont understood this. And I’m guessing he learned it on the set of Die Hard, where he was John McTiernan’s cinematographer. De Bont had cut is teeth in his native Holland working behind the camera for Paul Verhoeven. And after working as the DP on Hollywood hits like Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October, and Basic instinct, he’d earned his chance to take the reins as a director. Speed was de Bont’s first time calling the shots and it’s immediately clear that not only did he understand the technical mumbo jumbo of what lenses to use and how to frame his shots, he also understood the fundamental laws of white hat/black hat filmmaking. When Speed came out, a lot of folks referred to it as “Die Hard on a Bus.” And while that’s a little too glib, Dennis Hopper’s detonation-happy villain Howard Payne is right out of the Hans Gruber playbook. Mixing lunatic threats (“Pop quiz, hotshot…”), deep-grudge motivations, and the sort of mad, merry prankster wit that elevates your run-of-the-mill bad guy into an indelible puppet-master cinema psycho, Hopper (and his scarred hamburger hand) immediately pushed his way to the top tier of the movie-villain pantheon.
Because it’s three action movies in one
If you ask most people today what Speed is about, they’ll tell you that it’s about a bomb on a bus. They’re not wrong. Not exactly. But that’s really only the middle act of the movie. One of the things that makes Speed so great—so unique—is that it’s like an action movie Valu-Pak. The first third of the film revolves around Payne’s rigging of an office building’s elevator with a bomb, which is just as exhilarating and tense as anything that happens on the bus to follow. It’s also a pretty nifty display of narrative table-setting: In that cuticle-chewing 30-minute first act, we meet the villain, we understand who the hero is and what makes him tick, and we immediately get a sense of how far both are willing to go. Then, an hour later, after the whole bus ordeal is over, there’s still another 30 minutes left in the film. That’s where act three kicks in and somehow it’s just as sweaty as those first two action workouts, as Jack and Annie face off with Hopper’s things-go-boom bogeyman in the LA subway. In short, Speed is a movie that just doesn’t know how to fucking quit. It refuses to give up until your finger nails claw all the way through your armrest and you cry “Uncle.”
Because the flying bus stunt actually works…
All action movies ask you to suspend your disbelief at some point. And depending on how well they do their job up until that point, you either go with it or you mentally check out. In Speed, that moment comes when Annie is behind the wheel of the bus zipping along the LA freeways, crashing into cars left and right, muscling through hairpin turns, and just trying to keep the speedometer above 50 so everyone on board isn’t blown to smithereens. Then, over the radio, she and Jack are told that they’re approaching an unfinished overpass with a 20-foot gap. They’re going to have to put the pedal to the metal and try to jump over the chasm like Evil Knievel outside of Caesar’s Palace. When the Wages of Fear moment finally comes, it’s utterly ridiculous. Yet, you’re totally on board, you go with it, you accept it, simply because everything leading up to that moment has been so life-sized and human and real. If Arnold was behind the steering wheel instead of Annie, you’d throw your hands in the air like a blackjack dealer at the end of his shift and say, “I’m out.”
Because of the baby carriage scene…
Any half-decent screenwriter will tell you that if you’re going to try to ratchet up the tension like a vise in an action-thriller, you’ve got to give the audience a few moments to exhale—a few beats that break that tension so they won’t pop a hernia or grind their molars to dust. Speed screenwriter Graham Yost (who, it should be noted, reportedly got an assist from uncredited script doctor Joss Whedon) totally gets this, sprinkling in both chatty humor and moments of exhaling relief. The humor part comes mainly from Bullock (who not only shows off her average-jane action-hero chops, but also her ‘30s screwball comedy ones as well) and Jeff Daniels, as Reeves’ partner. As for the exhale moments, the best one comes mid-way through the film, when Annie is swerving through LA side-street traffic, crashing into shit left and right because she can’t slow down, and then sees a woman with a baby stroller crossing the road. She’s gonna hit it. She has no choice. Watching the moment of ghastly high-speed impact as the baby carriage soars through the air in slow motion, you can’t help but gasp. (You also can’t help think of Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkinor De Palma’s great knock-off of it in The Untouchables, but that’s neither here nor there) Then, where we think we’ll see a bunch of bloody baby parts land in the street, we see a bunch of cans. There was no baby. The lady was no mom. She was just another poor LA soul scrounging for nickel deposits. Phew! Moments like that don’t get mentioned much in movie reviews, but they should.
Because it looks like freakin’ Citizen Kane next to Speed 2: Cruise Control…
By the early ‘90s, even movies that barely broke even were getting sequels greenlit. So after grossing ten times its original budget, there was never a question of whether there would be a Speed 2. Unfortunately, Speed 2 ended up sucking. Hard. While it’s somehow easy to imagine New York cop John McClane crossing paths with terrorists over and over again and an infinite laundry list of impossible missions for Ethan Hunt to tackle, for some reason, Speed never really set itself up with the same open-ended conclusion. Jack and Annie smooch and joke about how relationships that begin under extreme circumstances never work in the end and we can either take their word for it or, more likely, imagine them shacking up together and living happily (and uneventfully) ever after. But it’s hard to see how their story leads to another brush with a hair-trigger terrorist. Of course, that didn’t stop Fox from moving forward on the bone-headed Speed 2: Cruise Control—which is basically Speed on The Love Boat. It’s hard to get to know who was contractually obligated to do what and who was paid how much to sign on to this waterlogged dose of sloppy seconds, but both de Bont and Bullock agreed to be in the film and Reeves wisely said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” That’s when they should have pulled the ripcord. But Hollywood fears nothing more than leaving money on the table, so they went ahead anyway with Jason Patric stepping in for Reeves. And to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: Senator, I’ve watched Jason Patric, and he’s no Keanu Reeves. Anyway, Speed 2 is a dog with fleas. Not only does the film fail as a thriller, the setting is ludicrously implausible, the leech-loving techno-villain (Willem Dafoe) is a cipher and a joke, and Bullock and Patric have less chemistry than the oil and vinegar on the salad I had for lunch yesterday. All of which, frankly, makes Speed look even better these days—if that’s even possible. Which leads me to one final telling footnote: rather than salting away many, many millions of dollars to return for Speed 2, Reeves went off and played Hamlet on stage in Winnipeg. Winnipeg!
You Might Also Like