When a movie sets out to blast a huge audience right out of their seats, like “`Speed 2: Cruise Control,” it can sometimes blow itself out of the water instead.
“Speed 2,” which was intended as a major summer blockbuster — and will rack up impressive receipts no matter how many people are disappointed — is a movie amok, an action thriller with the brakes sawed off. Starring “Speed’s” Sandra Bullock (but not Keanu Reeves) and set in the Caribbean on a swanky cruise liner (the Seabourne Legend), this movie seems jam-packed with cliffhangers, pyrotechnics and most of the elements necessary for a sure-fire smash.
Because it’s made so well — due to director Jan de Bont, Bullock and other veterans of “Speed” (and some from De Bont’s second big hit, “Twister”) giving their all — you can’t easily dismiss “Speed 2.” But you should. This numbingly lavish sequel to 1994’s surprise action hit about the bomb on the bus has a script of confounding senselessness, a production of stupefying silliness and waste.
As Bullock’s Annie Porter (the suddenly recruited bus driver of “Speed”), Jason Patric’s Alex Shaw (Keanu Reeves’ uncomfortable replacement) and Willem Dafoe’s colorful villain John Geiger (a disgruntled cruise-line computer employee out to smash up everything) race around the Legend, we may feel queasy. As bombs tick, passengers scream, computers flash and lifeboats capsize, we can see the Legend — and “Speed 2” — racing full-speed toward a wall of cliches.
This is a film with terrific explosions, great crashes, fantastic collisions and a sexy cast. Isn’t that what movie entertainment is all about? Isn’t that what the first “Speed” sold so well? Yet, for all its high confidence and sock-in-the-eye style, “Speed 2” is a high-tech fiasco, full of unemotional romance, incoherent action, ludicrous plotting and inexplicably dumb characters. Back in the Victorian era, they called horror pulps “penny dreadfuls.” Should we call “Speed 2” a 100-million-dollar dreadful?
“Speed,” which was silly in a different way — and much more entertaining — was set on a bus that had been wired by a maniac (Dennis Hopper) to explode if it dropped below 50 miles per hour. “Speed 2” is set on a cruise liner whose computers have been reprogrammed by another maniac (Dafoe) to send it crashing into an oil tanker, after he loots the ship’s safe.
In both cases, Bullock’s Annie Porter stumbles into the middle of the mess and has to race her way out of it. Here, though, she’s without Reeves, who bailed out (apparently pleading action-movie fatigue after “Chain Reaction”). And since Reeves’ lines, seemingly only partially rewritten, have been given to a different actor, Jason Patric — as another LAPD troubleshooter — the movie gets strange immediately. In “Speed,” Bullock and Reeves had a nervous chemistry. Bullock and Patric, by contrast, are more like irresistible force and immovable object. Bullock pours so much erotic energy into their scenes, to such small effect, she begins to seem obsessively overavailable.
We first meet Annie in the midst of an absurd driving test, administered by a comically flustered Tim Conway. This scene is intercut with one of Alex’s most daring arrests. Then we learn, astonishingly, that though Alex and Annie have been dating (after her breakup with Reeves’ Jack), Alex has kept his job as a cop secret. Supposedly, Annie has an aversion to death-defiers since Jack left. And to mollify her, Alex suggests a Caribbean cruise.
Aboard the luxury cruiser are a surprisingly doltish group, which include a club of overeaters and a speech-impaired young teen named Drew (Christine Firkins), who gets the hots for Alex. And there’s also Geiger, a wild-eyed chap who applies leeches to his chest in a strange daily ritual and is so attached to his golf bag that he flies into a wild rage when it’s sent late to his room. Geiger is supposed to be the movie’s big-star villain, like John Malkovich in “In the Line of Fire,” but though Dafoe gives the part and the movie more than it deserves, by the end he’s drowning in stereotypes, like everyone else.
“Speed 2,” written by two first-time feature writers, Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson (from a McCormick-De Bont story), has an awful script, a by-the-numbers fiasco in which everyone — even the genius villain — behaves like a fool. Yet the writers’ devotion to stereotypes has one advantage. If the whole movie weren’t so jammed with cliches, you might not be able to tell what was going on from one scene to the next.
Frantic parents search for Drew as the ship is evacuated, ignoring the knocking coming from the room where she’s imprisoned. The overeaters club, trapped in a room with a gas leak, strip down and shove their clothes into the air vents. Geiger, as he speeds away from the carnage toward his amphibious plane, becomes upset when his now meaningless hostage Annie escapes, and takes off after her.
And, at the expensive climax, as the Legend plows straight toward a harbor city filled with pleasure-boats, smashing everything in its path and charging toward the biggest collision of all — a full-scale wipeout of an entire city constructed especially for the movie — we see crowds of people who wait until the last 10 seconds to jump out of its way. What were they doing for the previous 15 minutes as they watched the dreadnought bearing down on them? Catching a tan?
De Bont, as he proved in the first “Speed” and in “Twister,” has a gift for wildly kinetic action scenes. His multiple-camera style and rapid-fire cutting mainline energy into every scene. But here, he’s like an action painter, splashing paint on a wall full of holes. “Speed” and “Twister,” shallow or formulaic as their scripts may have been, seem like models of dramatic logic next to “Speed 2.” There’s only one way to play material like this: as a huge joke. And, by the end of “Speed 2,” that’s what the movie has pretty much become.
One of the reasons “Speed” worked so well was that it took place on a bus, storming down the L.A. streets in broad daylight — which let you feel all the speed and forward motion. But the first half of the “Speed 2” action takes place on a ship at night in the middle of an ocean. Not only can’t you feel the speed or see the colorful backdrop, but you also can’t make too much sense of what you can see. And because Dafoe’s villain has a genuine grievance in the movie — his company fired him when he contracted a terminal illness — you may begin to sympathize with him instead of the heroes. After all, he’s the one who seems to have the right idea about “Speed 2: Cruise Control”: Just crash that boat and get out fast.
”SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL”
(star) (star)
Directed and produced by Jan de Bont; written by Randall McCormick, Jeff Nathanson; photographed by Jack N. Green; edited by Alan Cody; production designed by Joseph Nemec III, Bill Kenney; music by Mark Mancina. A 20th Century Fox release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:05. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Annie Porter ………………… Sandra Bullock
Alex Shaw …………………… Jason Patric
John Geiger …………………. Willem Dafoe
Maurice …………………….. Glenn Plummer
Juliano …………………….. Temuera Morrison
Merced ……………………… Brian McCardie
