D: Jan de Bont / 116m

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels, Joe Morton, Alan Ruck, Glenn Plummer, Richard Lineback, Beth Grant, Hawthorne James, Carlos Carrasco

When some of the workers in one of L.A.’s high-rise office buildings get into an elevator, they don’t realise they’ve just become hostages in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between ex-cop turned bomb-loving nut job Howard Payne (Hopper) and the police.  With the elevator wired up with explosives, it’s down to maverick cop Jack Traven (Reeves) and his partner, Harry Temple (Daniels), to rescue the hostages, and capture Payne.  However, while the hostages are rescued, Payne manages to escape.

Some time later, Traven is getting his morning coffee and doughnuts when a nearby bus explodes, destroying it, and the driver, completely.  A pay phone rings; it’s Payne, with a challenge for Traven.  There’s a bus rigged with explosives that will be armed if the bus travels at over fifty miles an hour.  The catch?  If it slows below fifty miles an hour, then the bomb will go off, killing everyone on board.  Jack’s mission is simple: to find the bus, get on it and stay with it until Payne’s ransom demands are met.  Once on the bus, Traven’s presence leads to the driver (James) being shot and wounded.  Luckily, passenger Annie Porter (Bullock) takes over from him, and Traven explains why he’s on the bus.  He also manages to alert Temple and their boss Lieutenant McMahon (Morton).  With various obstacles and problems to overcome – a very sharp right turn at an intersection, a gap in the freeway – Traven and Porter keep the bus moving above fifty, while Harry tries to track down Payne.

Eventually, Traven realises that Payne has been watching the bus via a hidden camera all along.  McMahon, with the aid of a local news crew, hijack the signal and overlay a recording of Traven and the passengers sitting quietly on the bus.  With this in place, Traven attempts to defuse the bomb but without success, but he does get the passengers off (and himself) before the bus – now roaming an airport – collides with a plane and explodes.  At first unaware of what’s happened, when Payne finds out he goes to where the ransom is to be left and abducts Annie, heading down into the subway.  Traven goes after him, and while Payne is taken care of, he and Annie have a bigger problem: the train’s brakes aren’t working, and Annie is handcuffed around a pole…

The surprising thing about Speed is that after twenty years it’s still as exciting as it was on first release, it’s high-concept storyline and mixture of vehicular mayhem with a vivid sense of humour, still hitting the mark, and still an object lesson in how to mount and execute an action movie.  It’s also a small miracle that it was made at all.  Graham Yost’s original script – originally intended for Jeff Bridges and Ellen DeGeneres as Traven and Annie – ended when the bus blew up; the addition of the subway scenes helped get the movie the go-ahead.  John McTiernan was the producers’ first choice for director but he turned them down.  The dialogue was given an almost complete re-write by Joss Whedon.  The scenes shot on the then unopened I-105 highway were filmed around the remaining construction work, leading to numerous continuity errors that appear in the movie.  The producers weren’t convinced about Reeves (especially when they saw his haircut), and wanted a big name actress to appear alongside him; de Bont insisted on casting Bullock.  And the production ran out of money before filming was completed; at very early previews the subway scenes were shown as animated story boards, but thanks to positive audience feedback for these scenes, extra money was found to finish the movie.

And yet, despite all that adversity, Speed is a triumph, a well-oiled adrenaline rush of a movie that rarely lets up, its central section so tightly orchestrated and edited (by John Wright) that there’s barely an ounce of cinematic fat to be found.  The movie is often breathtaking, its propulsive qualities keeping the viewer on the edge of their seat, maintaining an immersive power that makes watching it as exhilarating as if you were on the bus yourself.  Its tripartite structure, utilising various modes of transport – elevator, bus, subway train – is cleverly done, increasing the stakes as the movie progresses (as well as the speed these modes of transport can travel at), and providing each section with a satisfying pay-off (the bus/plane explosion is still one of cinema’s finest incendiary moments).  The famous bus jump – filmed for real even though it doesn’t look like it – is the movie’s big heart-stopper and even now, can get audiences willing the bus to clear the gap.

With all that action going on it would be easy to forget that the movie has a big heart, and can pack an emotional wallop when required – Helen (Grant) trying to get off the bus and ending up under the wheels, the bus hitting the pram (what a shocker that must have been when the movie was first shown) – and there’s also the movie’s often wry sense of humour and quotable one liners: “Jesus. Bob, what button did you push?”; “I already seen the airport”; and “Yeah, but I’m taller”.  It’s an inherently silly movie when all’s said and done, as preposterous an idea as you could possibly imagine, but it works, thanks largely to the cast treating it seriously and playing it straight (verbal quips aside).  Reeves though is horribly wooden, a big thick plank of wood in a tight t-shirt, but he’s still a good fit for the character.  Bullock takes a fairly nondescript role and turns it into a star-making turn, while Hopper, as expected, piles on the ham as Payne, chewing the scenery with barely restrained relish.  Annie’s fellow passengers, from Ruck’s slow-witted tourist to Carrasco’s abrasive construction worker, come in and out of prominence as the script demands, but each actor has his or her moment to shine.  And both Daniels and Morton are as dependable as ever as Traven’s colleagues in the L.A.P.D.

Viewers paying close attention will spot errors in continuity that should rankle, but end up being a part of the movie’s charm, and there are goofs galore including dialogue spoken when a character’s mouth is clearly shut, and Harry’s limp switching from left leg to right leg to left leg, and so on (and then being abandoned altogether when he and his team raid Payne’s home).  But none of this really has any detrimental impact on the movie, and under de Bont’s more than capable direction, Speed sets a high standard that few action movies made since then have come close to bettering.

Rating: 8/10 – for all its inconsistencies and dumb-ass leading character, Speed is a thrill ride – mostly set on a bus – that compels the audience’s attention and rewards it with escalating tension and drama; quite simply, one of the best action movies of the Nineties, and a movie that shrugs off its Die–Hard-on-a-bus premise to provide an experience that is still as exciting as it was twenty years ago.