Chapter Two
Speed 2: Cruise Control
By Brett Ballard-Beach
August 18, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I will start off, however, with a brief background of both films, anchored by a comparison and contrast of the budgets, grosses, and reception for the Speeds to suggest the vast distance between what was at stake in 1994 and what was at stake in 1997.
Speed arrived in theaters with a $30 million budget, marking the directorial debut of Jan De Bont, a cinematographer of some 50 films over 25 years. The first half of his career was spent primarily in The Netherlands, where he DP’d a good number of Paul Verhoeven’s early films. Between 1981 and 1992, he worked on Hollywood productions of all shapes, sizes, and merits, from Cujo to The Jewel of the Nile, Leonard Part 6 to Die Hard, and The Hunt for Red October to Basic Instinct. Since Speed 2, he has directed only two other films.
Screenwriter Graham Yost was also making a debut of sorts, marking his first theatrically produced screenplay, having written for television before (Herman’s Head, The Powers That Be) and mostly since (From The Earth to the Moon, Boomtown). There was nothing to inherently suggest an action film of any merit, particularly one that would be rapturously reviewed, and that would catch on with audiences and hang around for most of the summer. But after debuting at #1 with about $14 million, Speed would go on to gross nearly 9 times that, finishing out with $121 million in North America and an impressive $350 million globally.
Arriving almost three years to the day after the first film, Speed 2 had seen De Bont’s stock soar astronomically in the interim (thanks to a minor hit called Twister). For the sequel, he was director, producer and co-writer of the story (unlike Kevin Costner in that same year’s The Postman, he did not co-write and/or sing any of Speed 2’s closing credits songs). Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson are individually credited for the screenplay and while Nathanson moved on to Rush Hour, Men in Black, and Indiana Jones sequels, McCormick has direct-to-video sequels to The Scorpion King and Blue Crush to his credit.
The budget for Speed 2 was a fantastical $160 million, owing in part to large salaries for the director and stars, but also reflecting the problematic nature of filming away from land, and a few noteworthy scenes of destruction as well. Opening at only a few million higher than its predecessor, Speed 2 was dead in the water by July 4th and finished with under $50 million. With international figures, it eked out making back its production cost, but just barely. Siskel and Ebert gave Cruise Control its only positive reviews of note. On Rotten Tomatoes today, Ebert’s take is the only positive among 50 mostly scathing reviews. What could have been a trilogy, if not a franchise, came to a dead halt with the finality of a...sinking ship.
As visual metaphors that sum up a movie’s troubles go, the penultimate finale, with an unstoppable cruise ship wreaking extensive havoc as it crashes through the harbor of a tiny Bahamian seaport and comes to rest in the town square, fairly encapsulates what is wrong with Speed 2. I don’t doubt that there is a way to make it seem exciting to watch a cruise liner gradually slow down even as it crushes boats, piers, cars and buildings in its way, but when the ship doesn’t appear to be moving all that fast to begin with, it creates a base problem of visual logistics.
De Bont and his editor keep cutting to the ship’s navigator, stunned and dazed, reading aloud the digitally displayed speed (which the audience also sees) as it slows from 10 to 9 to 7 all the way down to zero. This is done at least half-a-dozen-times and after it fails as comedy and an interesting plot choice the first time, it becomes agonizing to keep returning to it.
Also, at this point, there is nothing that anyone on board can do - the prior sequence is one of the ship being agonizingly turned starboard manually to avoid a head-on collision with an oil tanker and it does pack a visual wallop - so the audience is also treated to stunned reaction shots of the passengers and crew, alternated with stunned reaction shots of the locals on land for what amounts to nearly ten minutes of interminable “so-what” destruction.
Two thoughts kept running through my head during this and other sequences involving the imperiled passengers. The first was that for all its millions of dollars, there is a certain shoddiness that hangs over much of Speed 2, ultimately rendering it as a particularly low-rent version of the “disaster flick” sub-genre (nothing in Speed 2 wasn’t done at least as entertainingly in something like Airport ’77). My other musing concerned how the Steven Spielberg who helmed 1941 might have handled the destruction for destruction’s sake.
Casting Willem Dafoe as John Geiger, the disgruntled computer whiz seeking revenge on the employer who terminated him when he became sick, seems a foolproof path to action movie nirvana. Giving him leeches that he self-administers to help suck out his poisoned blood screams over-the-top-camp. And yet, the film bobbles his character arc. Early on, he seems weird but not evil enough.
When his demonic grin and over-caffeinated eyes finally muster up an appearance halfway through, they all too quickly shade over into clichéd psycho with a sneer and a quip at the ready. His final moments should crescendo and then explode (particularly considering how his final scene is quite a bang) but once again, the timing is off and he exits pitiful instead of scarily deranged. For the man who played Bobby Peru and Max Schreck, it isn’t enough. As a warm-up for the Green Goblin, it’s acceptable.
Jason Patric is an intense and intimidating actor at his best playing hard-luck characters right on the gray borderline between hero and villain, redemption and oblivion. He fits in easily with noir (After Dark, My Sweet) and jagged cop dramas (Rush and Narc). Yes, he has The Lost Boys to his name, and he turned in a nifty supporting role as the larger-than-life villain in the comic book adaptation The Losers, but those still have some edge to them. In Speed 2, Officer Alex Shaw has no edge to speak of, no lovable quirks, and outside of stymied attempts to propose to his girlfriend, nothing in the way of any defining character traits.
I think Leonard Maltin can provide me with an appropriate observation. In his capsule review of Backdraft, he notes, “the talented” Jennifer Jason Leigh “fails miserably playing a normal woman.” Patric looks so ill at ease playing the straight-ahead hero in a would-be blockbuster that it undercuts the success of most scenes he is in. This is not to say that he seems unbelievable performing the stunts. Those he actually excels at, with Shaw’s bull-headed rescue of his kidnapped girlfriend in the closing moments elevated by Patric’s single-track intensity. But with little to no chemistry with co-star Sandra Bullock and nobody else for him to really play off of, he is left to tromp around in the water. With refreshing candor, Patric has since admitted he took the part simply for the payday, to help finance Your Friends and Neighbors, the Neil LaBute film he produced the following year and in which he gives what may be his most unsettling and upsetting performance.
And the off casting, the vibe of which extends to most of the film’s performers, is mirrored in the off tone that seems to emanate from the film’s structure. There is the needless cameo and waste of comic legend Tim Conway as a driving instructor in the opening and closing moments. There is the bizarre reappearance of a very minor (and annoying) supporting character from the first film, and said character once again manages to do very little with nothing. There is the blithe attitude towards the destruction (and apparent death of a good number of people) in the climax, which I had thought was strictly the purview of Bruckheimer/Bay action-gasms.
The guests on the cruise ship prove to be indistinguishable from one another except by slight tone alterations in their incessant chattering. They seem to have escaped en masse from David Foster Wallace’s black comic non-fiction portrait of his own particular luxury liner hell in his “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” James Cameron’s Titanic and yes, even Kevin Costner’s unfairly maligned Waterworld demonstrated that you could attempt and succeed with big-budget high-stakes action set on water, even with a massive vessel at the heart of the your tale. De Bont’s film never figures out what to really do with the cruise ship, much less control it. It’s at the center of everything, and yet, ultimately, it’s nothing.
And I have managed to do it: take Speed 2 on its own terms without bemoaning how it lacks the original’s elevating thrills, tumbling from one audacious and expertly realized set piece to the next. I have highlighted its lack of an emotional core without contrasting that against the way Speed finds time to develop relationships among its characters in between and even during the spurts of action frenzy. I have isolated issues with the hero and the villain and corresponding performances without feeling the need to demonstrate how they pale in comparison to Keanu Reeves’ Zen blankness (as unlikely a template for an action hero as there ever was) and Dennis Hooper’s too-crafty-for-his-own-good public servant turned unwilling retiree/mad bomber.
I especially skirted the hazard of charting the decline of Annie Porter (Bullock), who between the two films morphed from a multi-dimensional woman making the best out of an impossible situation (and given shape by an actress on the rise in one of the great coming-out performances of the ‘90s) to a self-absorbed dithery nattering nabob, unrecognizable as the same person except by name.
I set out to avoid the cheap comparisons and easy potshots and by God I di... whoops.
Next time: “How Bad Do You Want It?” just keeps on coming with a 1970s horror film that is pretty much the ne plus ultra of critically and commercially eviscerated sequels. Is its reputation warranted?