Jan De Bont’s “Speed” is a movie that in many ways symbolizes why 1994 was such a great year for movies, if not the best year ever in the history of the world and all universes known and unknown in perpetuity. Unlike that last sentence, “Speed” was released upon the world without much hyperbole. It was a sleeper. The buzz surrounding it amounted to, “It’s Die Hard on a bus.” With a cinematographer making his directorial debut, Ted Theodore Logan Keanu Reeves playing a gung-ho cop, and the aforementioned formulaic premise, it did not seem the film had much to offer.
It was a modestly budgeted studio action movie, but without the expectations that accompanied that summer’s “Clear and Present Danger” or “True Lies.” For most of the college kids I knew, Johnny Utah Keanu Reeves was a bit of a head scratcher, oddly turning up in such artsy critically acclaimed fare such as “Much Ado About Nothing” and “My Own Private Idaho,” very rarely looking comfortable with the dialogue he was charged with reciting in his surfer-bro monotone.
But the movie had a few secret weapons, and what do you know? It was and remains pretty close to great, and word of mouth propelled it to smash hit status. Tarantino quoted the movie at the MTV movie awards the following year, and the unhip had suddenly become hip. First and foremost of these secret weapons is the script by Graham Yost, one of my favorite current geniuses/guys-I-hate-because-they’re-so-good, thanks to his work on FX’s “Justified.”
The first twenty to thirty minutes of the movie, a tense hostage/bomb situation on a skyscraper elevator, dispel the nutshell description of the film. And by the time That Tod Keanu Reeves (as Jack Traven, as in, “We will call you Jack Travern, and you will be a cop.”) exits a sticky situation involving mad-bomber Dennis Hopper and a hostage, who happens to also be a cop and Jack’s mentor, by shooting the cop/hostage/mentor – we know we’re in the hands of great storytellers. Furthermore, two other secret weapons have been revealed in the casting: Jeff Daniels as the mentor, Detective Harry Temple, and the late, great Republican Dennis Hopper as the mad bomber, Howard Payne.
“Guts’ll get you so far, and then they’ll get you killed,” Detective Harry Temple (“You will solve crimes and dispense quotable advice.”), tells Jack as they celebrate their apparent victory over Payne, who they believe was killed. Soon, Jack is testing the limits of Harry’s advice on a bus careening all over the ridiculous Los Angeles freeway system. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As with all of my favorite movies, there’s a smaller moment, not necessarily crucial to the plot, that occurs early in the film that sells me on it. In “Speed,” it’s when Jack enters a coffee shop and knows the bus driver who’s exiting at the same time. To me, it gives the movie a personal touch that reverberates when Payne resurfaces and blows that driver’s bus to smithereens. This explosion could have just been an explosion, but Jack knows the driver and therefore we feel like we know the driver. Payne calls Jack, lays out the rules of the game: Bomb on a bus. Bus hits 50 mph, bomb is activated. Bus dips below 50 mph, smithereens. Jack takes off to find the bus before Payne can finish a sentence (I love that shit!). At this point, it occurs to me that one of the movie’s perceived liabilities may just be a secret weapon.
About Keanu Reeves and his body of work up to this point: Reeves is for me an example of how actors used to be cultivated and primed until they were ready for stardom. Tom Cruise didn’t headline event movies right out of the gate. Same with Keanu, who admittedly went an artier and more independent route than Cruise. Big parts in small movies (“My Own Private Idaho”), small parts in big movies (“Parenthood”), studio niche or genre films (“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”), and a big part in a fairly big studio movie (“Point Break”), all led to “Speed.”
As of June 10, 1994, Reeves was a recognizable face, if not a household name. All of the above movies had played on cable for a few years, and we were used to him, he wasn’t jammed down our throats as the it boy. Katherine Bigalow’s “Point Break” let audiences know he could handle playing a cop. He’s not great in that movie, but he’s largely believable due to his athleticism. And college kids mocked his voice, but most people recognized his obvious screen presence. He wasn’t a star yet, but regular people saw his face on the poster and said, “Hey, I know who that is, I think I kind of liked him in that thing I saw him in.” The timing of Reeves’ rise was one of “Speed’s” secret weapons, and the movie is his “Top Gun.”
The final secret weapon in the movie’s arsenal is the casting of then largely unknown Sandra Bullock as Annie Porter (“You will embody hotness and girl-next-door approachability for all of your days.”), the passenger whose penchant for speeding citations has necessitated her frequent use of L.A.’s public transit system (I say largely because I knew her face from repeated viewings of “Love Potion Number 9” on Cinemax, a movie my roommate got me and our other roommates hooked on purely because of Sandra Bullock’s hotness in it, but whose name we never bothered to read in the credits because we were lazy.) Bullock character knows nearly everyone on the bus, they’re a kind of commuting family, another great touch.
It’s not just Sandra, though, or Keanu, or Hopper or Daniels. They’re as good as they are because of Graham Yost (I hate you! No wait, I love you!). I don’t mean to shortchange Jan De Bont. He does a great job here, but his subsequent work has not lived up to “Speed”, and I have to give the bulk of the credit to his screenwriter, that horrible evil awesome stupendous Graham Yost, whose name I curse and bow down to.
The movie works on a kinetic level because of De Bont. The second act bounces back and forth between Jack keeping order on the speeding bus, with Annie behind the wheel, Harry trying to figure out the identity of the mad bomber back at the station, and a team of cops who have pulled alongside the bus on a flatbed trailer, under the command of Captain McMahon (“You will mediate between the gung-ho thrill seeking cop and the cerebral thinking man’s cop”), played by Joe Morton (Secret weapon!).
Yost’s script is filled with humor, tension, and its plot turns in ways that would be completely predictable in the hands of a lesser writer. Harry, the brains behind the operation, is killed in a bomb blast. According to the mechanics of storytelling, of course he dies. Of course he dies because there’s no way for his advice to be put to the test unless he dies. But we don’t really see it coming, and I think it’s because dude already got shot, by Jack (“You fuck. You shot me!”) at the beginning of the movie, and we subconsciously expect his suffering to be over.
The genius of Harry’s advice, and Yost allowing it to function as a big theme of the movie, is that it allows the hero to get away with failure. The hero should fail. Over and over again, he should fail. But what most action movies get wrong, is that they allow the hero to fail but their failures often feel more like the results of stupid decisions. We often forgive these moves because they advance the plot, but on some level we know that dumb moves sacrifice character. The hero should fail and fail huge, and it should be when his back is totally against the wall and he has no choice but to make a move that’s potentially stupid.
In the case of Jack Travern, he fails with his back against a horizontal wall of concrete speeding underneath him at a blistering pace. Desperate to steady himself, he punctures the gas tank. When he’s back on the bus, the passengers smell gas, he breaks the news to them, and we can see it on a couple of the passengers’ faces: Dumb move, bro. But it wasn’t. It was the only move. It served character (Jack has to get smarter if he’s going to beat the mad bomber) and plot (We’re running out of gas…and fast!).
I walked away from “Speed” in 1994, having caught a sneak preview with my wife at the General Cinema Theatre at the Georgia Square Mall in Athens (Curse you, rolling rocking red vinyl chairs! Curse you!), feeling like I had seen a nearly perfect action movie. My friends said me and my wife were insane: It’s got that dude that ruined “Dracula,” half-loved the premise, half thought it was the stupidest premise they had ever heard of. But all of them went to see it and agreed that it was a great movie. In subsequent viewings, I have grown less fond of the ending, in which the action moves from the bus to a subway. It’s tense, exciting, and well-executed, but it feels like the stakes have been lowered significantly. The slight let-down of this sequence isn’t nearly enough to derail the movie, however, and it remains as superior an example of how to write, cast, direct, and sell an action movie as “Speed 2: Cruise Control” remains an example of how not to do all of the above.
“Speed” symbolizes the greatness of 1994 because it was something of a sleeper. I’m not suggesting that no one was looking forward to it, or that it was some kind of niche film that found its way. It was a second-tier action movie, designed to sell popcorn, but in exceeding its expectations, it became a huge hit, grossing $121 million domestically.
The movie was released by 20th Century Fox, and had an estimated budget of $25 million. Fox’s other big action movie that summer was “True Lies,” which had a budget of $120 million and made $146 million domestically. Clearly, “Speed” over performed. There are good years and bad years for movies, from the point of view of commerce and quality. In the good years, I believe Hollywood creates more commercially and artistic successful sleepers than in the leaner years.
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