June 10, 1994
So far my study of summer ’94 hasn’t found much excitement in the big blockbuster type movies. THE FLINTSTONES got all the hype but the ones I’ve been most invested in were quirky things by well known directors – SERIAL MOM, CROOKLYN, EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES. Now finally we come to a straight ahead action spectacle that truly delivered at the time and still holds up today.
SPEED came out 30 years ago as I post this, and it’s a classic. It feels like a very traditional studio crowdpleaser, but also not quite like anything else before or since. Twentieth Century Fox figured out what they had on their hands and moved it up from August to June, but no one else was sure at first if Keanu Reeves would be accepted as an action hero outside of POINT BREAK, or even if people would want to see him with short hair. So for many it was a surprise how big it became (5th highest grossing movie of 1994).
There was one 1994 action movie that grossed more, and it cost about 3 times as much to make. But especially compared to today’s action movies, SPEED wasn’t remotely cheap. It has great production value, it seems huge. There are numerous vehicle related stunts (stunt coordinator: Gary Hymes, THE UNTOUCHABLES, JURASSIC PARK, THE FLINTSTONES) so it feels very analog, but we may forget that there are also a ton of miniatures involved (and also some c.g. according to the credits, but I couldn’t tell you where).
It sets such an “oh yeah, this is gonna be awesome” mood in the opening credits – Mark Mancina’s score (which quickly betrays his background as one of Hans Zimmer’s “additional music” guys) plays over one long shot lowering down 50 stories of an elevator shaft, the lettering of the names made to look three-dimensional and parallel to the building, disappearing behind the metal beams. I’ve read that the model used for this shot was 80 feet tall. STAR WARS shit. (In fact, Grant McCune and his company did the miniatures, and he was the chief model maker on the actual STAR WARS.)
Although screenwriter Graham Yost (Hey Dude, Herman’s Head) initially wrote it entirely on the bus, and that’s the part our minds jump to when we hear the title SPEED, I think it’s kind of crucial that we also get a 23 minute opening chapter of elevator terror. Mad bomber Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper after a run of SUPER MARIO BROS., TRUE ROMANCE and RED ROCK WEST) first tries to ransom the $3 million he wants by setting bombs to drop an elevator full of office workers.
Unlike the L.A. of DIE HARD, more like the New York of DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, SPEED depicts the authorities as highly competent, extremely on the ball, not burdened with stupidity, wrongheadedness or in-fighting, full of creative problem-solving and an ability to get all the weird equipment and people who know how to use it to the exact place they need it to save lives. In fact this even extends to the media – when Lieutenant McMahon (Joe Morton, last seen in THE INKWELL) needs someone to pick up the UHF signal of the security camera on the bus to record and then rebroadcast a looped video all he has to do is bark a brief order to a local news cameraman who does not pause a millisecond before literally running to do it.
It’s a preposterous but comforting fantasy. Just go with it. The camera moves really emphasize how awesome everybody is – police cars tear in, skid out, officers launch into action like rockets, the camera chasing right behind them, like we’re going too. Helicopters slide elegantly through the frame, apparently in shots with buses and cars, probly fake I guess, but looks real and incredibly choreographed. I’ve always loved that our two lead cops literally drop into the movie from the heavens, in such a hurry to get to the scene of the crime that their car has somehow caught huge air and there’s only time to show us the landing.
Gum-chewing maverick cop Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves, who we’ve already seen in EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES and LITTLE BUDDHA this summer) volunteers himself and his older partner Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels right before DUMB AND DUMBER) to go check on the elevator. Jack determines that the bomber is going to drop these hostages whether he gets paid or not and, demonstrating a knack for improvisation that will be important later, he finds some kind of crane on the roof that he’s able to drop down the shaft, hook onto a conveniently placed ring and hold the elevator up when the bombs go off. Of course, the crane then bends and breaks, gets caught on something, eventually becomes disconnected during a drawn out sequence of Jack and Harry pulling each of the passengers to safety with a constant feeling that they’re about to be crushed or plummet down the shaft. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that de Bont has seen his countryman Dick Maas’ elevator horror movie THE LIFT.
Jack is also a good detective, so he guesses that the culprit would be on site and that he must be using the freight elevator. Sure enough they catch up with Payne, who seems to get blown up during the confrontation.
So we get this short disaster film and they manage to save the day, get medals for it, go out drinking to celebrate, then it’s the next morning and Jack is getting his usual coffee and muffin and in an amazing shot a fucking bus explodes down the block before he gets back into his car. It feels like we’re going to settle down for a bit and catch our breath and then – nope. While Jack stands next to the flaming wreck trying to process what the fuck is going on he hears the eerie sound of a phone ringing, and realizes what’s what. I love the shot slowly pushing in on a pair of pay phones, the flame reflected in their metal. This is one of at least three big spec scripts of the ‘90s (along with SIMON SAYS a.k.a. DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE and SCARY MOVIE a.k.a. SCREAM) where a mysterious mastermind calls up the protagonist and tells them the rules of the game his evil ass insists on playing.
So right away we’re on to that $350 million premise: the bus with the bomb in it that blows up if it goes below 50 mph or if they try to get any passengers off the bus. Jack commandeers a random dude (Glenn Plummer, MENACE II SOCIETY)’s Jaguar convertible (is the license plate “TUNEMAN” supposed to mean he’s a musician?), chases the bus, actually jumps into the bus, putting himself into extreme danger to warn them and help them find a way out of this seemingly unwinnable situation.
It’s easy to imagine a version of this where the passengers all argue for a while, whether out of the ‘90s image of L.A. as a place boiling over with racial tension, or just the conventional wisdom that that’s where you find drama. SPEED refreshingly avoids that kind of busy work, and about the only racial stereotyping is the character who assumes Jack is there to arrest him and pulls out a gun, which leads to the accidental shooting of the driver (Hawthorne James, PENITENTIARY II), and a passenger named Annie (Sandra Bullock, DEMOLITION MAN) taking the wheel. I think it would be better if the driver just had a heart attack from the stress, but they didn’t run it by me.
Taking the bus has been my primary mode of transportation for more than half of my life, so I get kind of a kick out of how little SPEED resembles the actual experience. It’s so funny to me that Annie and bus driver Sam repeatedly call each other by name. Helen (Beth Grant, CHILD’S PLAY 2, THE DARK HALF) also calls him Sam and later Annie starts calling another passenger (Carlos Carrasco, THE RETURN OF SUPERFLY), by his last name, Ortiz. I just have never experienced this. There are a few people who I see repeatedly but we definitely don’t know each other’s names, or make conversation, and I don’t notice other people doing it. What’s more, it’s established that Annie hasn’t been riding the bus for long, she just had her license suspended for speeding, so she’s gotten that familiar with everyone in record time. Jack doesn’t even ride the bus as far as we know, but he also knows a bus driver by name (John Capodice, Q: THE WINGED SERPENT, as Bob) when he’s getting his morning coffee, so maybe that’s just how it is when you live in a small town like, uh, Los Angeles, California. But I’m thinking it might be one of Annie’s talents to know people’s names, because at the end she asks “Where’s Payne?” and I’m pretty sure nobody ever said his name in her presence.
I think some of this is residue from an earlier draft when the passengers all had backstories to differentiate them. Sounds like too much to me. When you hear about the rewrites you start to appreciate how simple it ended up. There are so many ways it could’ve been too complicated or too contrived. For example, there was a draft where Harry was secretly the mastermind, and originally the passenger Doug (Alan Ruck, YOUNG GUNS II) was an asshole lawyer causing trouble on the bus. Uncredited script doctor and real life member of the fraternity-like group that inspired PCU Joss Whedon (after the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER movie, before the show) wisely changed him to a harmless dorky tourist. Not every DIE HARD needs an Ellis.
When I wrote about SPEED ten years ago I went into the shorthand “DIE HARD on a bus” and tried to catalog how SPEED was and wasn’t like DIE HARD. On this viewing I thought about how in some ways it’s more like a disaster movie. They’re only directly fighting a guy at the beginning and end – the rest of the time it’s people working together to survive and be rescued from this out of control situation. It happens to be man-made and planned, but otherwise it might as well be an earthquake or a boat hitting an iceberg or whatever. Then I listened to an episode of the SPEED podcast 50 MPH where Yost kind of said the same thing. It’s an action movie that’s like a disaster movie, that’s why it feels different.
Jack Traven is very different from John McClane, and also pretty different from the type of action heroes McClane had initially seemed so different from. Admittedly our introduction to him as the guy who saves the hostage by shooting him follows in the LETHAL WEAPON Martin Riggs tradition, but while he’s on the bus he acts more like a sturdy rescue worker, coming up with plans and instructing the civilians in a reassuring way.
Whedon, who famously rewrote almost all of the dialogue a week before shooting, told In Focus that he made Jack less of “a maverick hotshot” and “just the polite guy trying not to get anybody killed.” And he told 50 MPH that the inspiration came from Reeves telling him the SWAT guys he’d met for research were “unfailingly polite” and called everyone sir or ma’am. So Whedon decided instead of a hotshot Traven would be “a lateral thinker.
That’s my impression of the character, though the one time he kills a bad guy he gets two different one-liners. After (30 year old spoiler) Payne’s head gets knocked off Jack has the extremely Whedony wisecrack, “Yeah, but I’m taller.” Then he goes back inside the subway car and tells Annie “He lost his head,” which is a straight up Schwarzenegger in COMMANDO line, don’t you think? Must be the only one Whedon left in.
I’m always impressed when an action movie seems to be working on a check list of modes of transportation. We have action in a car, on the bus, we have helicopters involved, the bus crashes into a plane, and then the last act is on the subway. Kinda funny that the bus jumps a freeway overpass that’s not finished and the subway jumps out of a tunnel that’s not finished. SPEED is a movie that says hurry up on that infrastructure!
Despite the propulsive nature of the whole endeavor de Bont does find ways to fit in little moments to breathe. One of my favorites is after the bus crashes into the airplane and explodes and we see that from different angles, at different speeds, and reflected in the windows of the LAX bus now holding the rescued passengers, we get to see them taking in the sight and contemplating that they were inside that bus until just a few minutes ago.
It’s pretty impressive how much of an impact the people behind SPEED went on to make. De Bont’s directorial career was surprisingly brief (five movies across nine years) but they were all big studio movies, he never fizzled out in ambition (just in popularity). Screenwriter Yost also did BROKEN ARROW and HARD RAIN, but to me he’ll always be the creator of Justified. Uncredited rewriter Whedon did ALIEN RESURRECTION and of course had a full-on TV empire starting with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then graduated to blockbuster director via super hero movies with THE AVENGERS. He was eventually exposed as a big asshole and a creep and apparently doesn’t have it in him to do the right wing pivot that would make that his new job, so he’s pretty much disappeared from public sight. But to say he didn’t do alot of good and highly influential work would be a lie, and he got started onto that thanks in part to the reputation he had from SPEED.
Meanwhile, Bullock was launched to superstardom, mostly in romcoms, was in a best picture winner ten years later (admittedly it was CRASH) and won an Oscar for THE BLIND SIDE five years after that. She’s had some good ones, like GRAVITY, but my favorite Sandra Bullock cinematic moment is from THE HEAT.
And finally, of course, we have Keanu Reeves. 30 years ago today Entertainment Weekly published an article with the headline “Keanu Reeves, the next action star?” And it quoted him as replying to that question with, “I don’t have any ambition to do that. I’m not averse to working in the genre again; it was good, clean fun. But my ambition is variety.”
Of course, he was able to do that, while also doing four THE MATRIX movies and four JOHN WICKs and directing MAN OF TAI CHI and being undeniably one of the great western action icons of our time. I’d say he passed the pop quiz.
Additional notes:
This is truly an all-star team of solid studio craftsman. You got de Bont, cinematographer for DIE HARD, directing. You got cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak, who shot TERMS OF ENDEARMENT and the at-least-good-looking L.A. movie FALLING DOWN. Editor John Wright had done CONVOY, THE RUNNING MAN and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and would follow this with DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE. Production designer Jackson De Govia was a veteran of SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE, RED DAWN and REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS, but most importantly had done DIE HARD. They also had the DIE HARD art director, John R. Jensen. This was Alexander Witt’s first credit as a second unit director, and his later credits include THE BOURNE IDENTITY, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, AMERICAN GANGSTER, FAST FIVE, all of the Daniel Craig Bond’s except QUANTUM OF SOLACE, and FERRARI. And he directed RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE.
Michael Chapman was the cinematographer of THE LAST DETAIL, TAXI DRIVER, HARDCORE and many others. When he made his directorial debut with ALL THE RIGHT MOVES (1983), his cinematographer was Jan de Bont. Eleven years later de Bont made his directing debut with SPEED, and his cinematographer was Andrzej Bartkowiak, who went on to direct ROMEO MUST DIE, DOOM, STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI, etc. His cinematographer on CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE was Daryn Okada, who directed an episode of Scandal and 7 episodes of Station 19. Okay, I guess the chain doesn’t keep going. It would be cool if it did. I’ll keep you updated if there are ever any further developments.
June 10th, 2024 at 9:02 am
My last rewatch has been a while, but it is indeed a really exciting and well made movie. When it came out I admit to thinking that it looked dumb and resisted watching it for years. But obviously it won me over once I actually gave it a chance.
Of course one could now make fun of Keanu saying that he “wants variety” instead of action, but that was 30 years ago and he tried a lot, then found his niche. One of the reasons why he is now more popular than ever (of course besides apparently being the greatest human being in Hollywood), is that he found his limitations and learned how to use his talents.