As I sit down to write this it is currently 6/9, a date that would make Ted Theodore Logan most overjoyed and an overall shout-out toKeanu Reeves, the current king of the pop culture landscape. Yes, friends, we are in the midst of a full-on Keanu-ssance—a Belle Reeve-poque, if you will—that kicked off the moment the actor emerged be-suited to murder Theon Greyjoy for killing his dog inJohn Wickand has run straight through two moreWicksequels, a mighty thirst-inspiring turn in Netflix’sAlways Be My Maybe, a standout stuntman role inToy Story 4, andthis recent videowhere he says “cyberpunk” in a Batman voice. I do not know the context of that video. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that this recent resurgence is the perfect opportunity to remember that not only does Keanu still have it, he never really quite lost it, quietly building one of the sturdier resumes out there over the course of several decades. Look back, remember thatBill & Ted’s Excellent Adventureset the barfor heart-warming stories of bro-love; remember thatThe Matrixbasicallychanged action filmmaking forever; remember—and this is important for today’s discussion—that the 1994 flickSpeedstill owns to this day.
It does. It simply does. It did in 1994 when it snagged $350 million on a $38 million budget (plus a perfect 4/4Roger Ebert review), and it does today, exactly 25 years since it premiered, with all that time and all those rip-offs in-between doing nothing to dilute the fact that directorJan de Bont’s bus-bomb movie still owns so hard it should be illegal in some form. The premise, for the unfamiliar: Having been thwarted once by LAPD Officers Jack Traven (an extremely short-haired Reeves) and Harry Temple (an extremely oddly-castJeff Daniels), former bomb squad officer turned terrorist Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) straps a bomb to the bottom of an L.A. bus that will detonate should the vehicle drop below 50 miles-per-hour. Traven hops aboard the bus exactly like you’d expect a person named Jack Traven to do, spunky local Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock) takes the wheel, and the movie is off to the races.
It’s an absurdly simple premise that is then constructed outward into a two-hour explosion factory that defies both physics and God at every turn, which is of course exactly why the film works so well. One of the only modern-day movie things that turn me into a get-off-my-lawn old person is that I believe action movie premises need to be simpler and dumber again, with “dumber” of course being a high compliment. There’s a reason that pretty much every other action film after 1988—yes,evenSpeed!—was labeled aDie Hardrip-off.Die Hardunderstood quite possibly more than any other action film in history how to do a lot with somethingdeceptivelysimple. It’s the difference these days between, say, aFast & the Furiousentry andMad Max: Fury Road. TheF&Ffilms seem like a lot because they areA Lot, and by movie’s end, you’re mostly numb to the crashes.Fury Roadseems like a lot but it’s essentially just an hour-and-a-half car chase; because an insane Australian director took that premise and then blew a bunch of dope-looking go-karts to all fuck out in the desert, it turned into a masterpiece.
So,Speed, which underneath thethere’s-a-bomb-on-the-bus! type plot is really just the story of an average guy trying his darndest to get everyone out of this L.A. afternoon-gone-wrong in one piece. That’s actually pretty much howJoss Whedon, who did substantial uncredited work on the script,described Reeves' character: “What if he’s just the polite guy trying not to get anybody killed?” Sure, anyone with a basic working knowledge of Los Angeles traffic knows that bomb is going off within 15 minutes, tops. And sure, a bus straight-up flying off an unfinished overpass and clearing the gap is such a leap in scientific logic that I’m pretty sureNeil DeGrasse Tysongets a nosebleed whenever this movie replays on Starz. But these are the types of action beats that can be glossed over when there’s a simple core of relatability at the center of the madness.
Funny enough, a lot of that doesn’t even come from Reeves here.Speedcame three years after jock-brah action hero Johnny Utah inPoint Breakand five years before goober-messiah Neo inThe Matrix. Reeves is slotted into much more of a blank-slate here, and while it’s not a misfire casting on the level of like,Bram Stoker’s Dracula(also 1994!), it is essentially a straight-man role more than anything. Really, it’s Bullock that grounds the film; she exudes a type of real-world nervousness mingled with confidence from the moment she shows up. Because Annie is on the bus,we’reon the bus.
And whatever the exact diametric opposite of “grounded” is, that’s what Dennis Hopper is here to do. Dennis Hopper inSpeedis, not even kidding, the best Joker ever put to film. The Oscar-nominee is straight vaudevillian in his over-the-topness; I’m relatively sure he was paid for this film with a hefty daily allowance of cocaine and nothing else. But, again, it works, because if you’re sticking everyday people into a sick, unimaginable puppet show, the person pulling the strings needs to be otherworldly on their own.
Maybe it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact special juju makesSpeedhold up so well. Maybe it’s the fact that itshouldn’thold up so well, much less have worked in the first place. It reminds me of my favorite behind-the-scenes story from the film, told by de Bont on a DVD director’s commentary. While filming the bus jump, everyone involvedpretty understandablythought there was no way a few tons of rubber and metal would fly further than 20 feet. The bus proceeded to soar way,wayfurther than 20 feet, far longer than anyone could’ve imagined, and promptly smashed one of the cameras set up to capture the stunt. 25 years later, still unexpectedly smashing.
