Actually, I found this movie really boring

Rating: 2/10 (6 December 2013)

I heard a lot of hype about this movie when it was on the big screen and a lot of people seemed to like it and say good things about it. I never got around to seeing it on the big screen, and was not too keen on seeing it considering Sandra Bullock's quote: let's have a relationship based purely upon sex. That seriously put me off seeing the movie, but I watched it when my sister hired it and my opinion was that it was dull.
Speed is supposed to be an action movie with suspense that leaves you on the edge of your seat. The best part of the movie is when the bus smashes through a pram but after that the rest of the movie is simply too predictable. The events in the movie are not constructed in a way that makes you wonder what is going to happen. We expect everything to be all right, and of course it is. There is one scene where the bus has to jump a gap in the freeway, and it is a very wide gap. We know that the bus is going to make it because there is no other way of solving the situation without killing a majority of the people on board the bus (which would end up defeating the purpose of the film) An ex-bomb squad officer is disillusioned at the measly pension that he received after retiring so he decides that he will use his knowledge of bombs to get himself a lot of money. He plans an elevator bomb but his plan is foiled by the LAPD, and namely one particular officer played by Keanu Reeves. Angered at his failure, he wires more bombs to buses, one which explodes as a warning. The second is wired to a bus that arms when the bus exceeds fifty miles per hours and explodes when it drops below fifty kilometers an hour. He has a network of cameras to keep an eye on everything to make sure his plans are going okay.
There are a lot of faults in the movie. Like how can a crane that is designed to lift heavy weights cannot hold up an elevator full of people. Then the bigger hole is that this man has a measly pension yet he seems to not only have access to very specific explosives, but he also has the money to be able to afford some extremely advanced equipment. Being bomb squad, he has the knowledge to rig bombs, but it seems that he should not have the money.
Speed also raises some interesting issues, but puts them across badly. What we have in this movie is the fact that police officers are putting their lives on the line constantly yet are being paid very little. Whether this is true or not I don't know (I have since discovered that it is not actually true), but if this is an issue the movie brings it out in a very bad way. Basically it is telling us to shut up and put up with the problems in our society because there is no way to solve them. Basically if we try to solve them, usually through violence, then we are bound to fail. In another way this is also an anti-terrorist film, trying to put the message across to all us would be terrorists to warn us away from using violent methods to solve our problems, because even the grandest of schemes is doomed to failure.