Just the Meat and Potatoes, Please.

Rating: 10/10 (28 May 2010)

Stripping the action genre to its narrative core, the classic Speed draws equally from the disaster cycle, and is structured upon three extended set pieces in which a falling elevator, a speeding bus and a rushing train fulfill the sensory pleasures suggested in the title. This is what I believe makes Speed such a delightful revisit for us. It's a classic vehicle (pun intended) for a cop riding roughshod (double pun) to foil a scheme, but not inherently about any moral or legal maze, or a vendetta, or good vs. evil. The cops aren't saving the day from the bad guy so much because they're good guys, but because they have the resources and skills to do so. The bad guy himself isn't much more than a blank-slate psychopath and shouldn't be, because the real antagonists are the laws of physics themselves, fifty-storey elevator shafts, the finite nature of a full tank of gas, highways and other sorts of paths that are under construction. Speaking of which, why would a public subway car be on an incomplete track in the first place? So that it can burst through concrete into a street? There aren't detours and shoulders like a bus on an expressway. It would've saved L.A. and 20th Century Fox a few million dollars if Graham Yost's script made more sense. But what makes Speed such an enthusiastically gratifying experience is that it centralizes to the bottom line, inducing the pure effect of causing us to clench up.
Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock are not exactly thespians known for their versatility. They're movie stars who were young and hot in the 1990s, and played relatively the same characters in various scenarios. But neither are incapable of good performances, and Speed seems to embody the very Californian culture that makes their characterizations lend an everyday charm to these two people. Reeves plays L.A.P.D. SWAT specialist Jack Traven as a sweet, dedicated young guy who likely spends the weekend smoking bongs with his surfer buddies in between saving the lives of every hostage before an elevator is sent plummeting to certain destruction and using commandeered sports cars on Los Angeles freeways as his springboard to jump onto a bus full of people that may explode at any moment. It's a relative enough behavioral variation on the same spaced-out surfer dude/stoner/metalhead he'd been playing, but it gives Jack Traven a fast-sketch exposition, a very endearing one, resulting not in an invincibly tough Republican like McClane or Callahan or Rambo but a more vulnerable and contemporary polite guy pushing the limits of his mental and physical endurance to prevent anyone from being killed. Same with Bullock, who plays essentially the same brassy, inadvertently heroic everyday gal with a warm soul, so putting her Annie, with the convenient revoked license for speeding, in the driver's seat where she is responsible for making the fifty-foot leaps in unfinished road and avoiding pedestrians and other oncoming traffic, we have a character who is put to the test of her own mental and physical endurance as well, in a shorthand fashion by a script that cannot afford to slow down.
Now, the script does, nevertheless, interrupt itself when it leaves the speeding bus for five minutes or so at a time so that Harry, Jack's mentor/partner/best friend played by Jeff Daniels---yet another familiar actor installing behavioral abbreviation for a character---can compile clues to identify a culprit of whom we're already aware, as well as to elaborate superfluously on a far-fetched potential motive, or when Jack and Annie fall in love amidst a frantic life-or-death endurance trial that lasts under a day. And frankly, Dennis Hopper's ham-fisted mad-bomber extortionist is shown on-screen too often during the speeding bus situation for him to be as formidable as he could've been. Imagine the script were its blade not dulled by extraneous commercial sensibilities, a Speed that was able to give us the necessary result of the redundant on-screen investigation by Harry, a Speed confident and edgy enough to skip B on the way from A to C. But the acting, or more precisely the casting, is efficient enough to develop character in a way that streamlines the action.
Jan de Bont, though by no stretch the most consistent or unique, is yet another overseas filmmaker to have come to Hollywood and pumped it up with new inspiration and energy. All in all, what's more crucial than literal everyday people going about literally everyday routines, suddenly finding themselves in danger of dying by explosion, being pulverized, etc.? What could we care about more? We don't have to care that Martin Riggs misses his wife in Lethal Weapon, that John Rambo doesn't want to kill anymore but does, that Dirty Harry has to work with a female partner. We may like these other movies however much, but these are laughably petty concerns compared to people---cops, crooks, tourists, working stiffs, whatever---who have no choice but to struggle or be blown up. That is why Speed, flaws and all, is in a league of its own above other '80s, '90s actioners.