Speed 2: Cruise Control

This is probably as good a time as any to point out that Orson Welles scrounged for budgets all his life, yet studios routinely throw $110 million at crap like Speed 2. (This is also probably the only time you’ll ever see “Orson Welles” and “Speed 2” in the same sentence.) This sequel to the superb, drum-tight 1994 hit Speed is unusually terrible, even by low summer-schlock standards. It’s an insult to everyone who enjoyed the original; I strongly suspect that 20th Century-Fox took an existing Under Siege rip-off script and reworked it as a Speed “sequel.”

Keanu Reeves may have made Feeling Minnesota, but at least he had the sense to pass on this embarrassment. The director, Jan de Bont (the first Speed, Twister), should have followed Keanu’s lead. De Bont is a master of kinetic escapism — dumb but exhilarating, nimble fun. But what made him think he could reproduce the reckless thrill of a speeding bus in a sequel set entirely on a cruise liner? He can’t, and he falls back on circling helicopter shots of the ship, which moves with all the breathtaking speed of a dead sea tortoise while the pounding score keeps telling us we’re seeing incredible velocity.

Among the passengers on the luxury liner are Sandra Bullock, blandly reprising the role that made her America’s darling; Jason Patric (in for Keanu) as Sandy’s new SWAT-cop boyfriend; and, last and surprisingly least, Willem Dafoe in an indifferent performance as a disgruntled computer geek who takes control of the ship. This villain, who has some bizarre disease that requires him to stick leeches to his chest, plans to steal all the passengers’ jewelry — a good metaphor for Dafoe’s mercenary work here: Take the money and run.

Most of the time, we’re watching Sandy and Patric dash around rescuing rich fat-cat passengers we couldn’t care less about; I wanted to see a few of them achieve oneness with the ship’s propellers, but this is a PG-13 movie (unlike its R-rated predecessor), so there isn’t even that sick thrill. There’s a deaf girl who has a crush on Patric (who conveniently knows sign language — nothing comes of this); there’s a cameo by the reggae-rock band UB40, who perform on the ship and then mysteriously vanish — we don’t see them among the evacuees. Did they fall overboard? Did Dafoe feed them to his leeches? Everything builds to a double anti-climax in which the ship just misses impaling an oil tanker, then goes on to plow into a harborside resort. We get 87 shots of everyone in the cast spouting a PG-13 epithet in anticipation of the crash. Imagine — it took two screenwriters to come up with that. The endless collision is as unconvincing as it is boring.

Throughout, Bullock acts vaguely inconvenienced by all the chaos, while Patric is quickly making me forget his mercurial work in Rush. But then this movie isn’t much of a rush for anyone concerned. The original Speed is readily available; check it out again to remind yourself what genuinely inspired action looks like. Perhaps Jan de Bont should have watched it again, too.

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