Just Hit the Brakes Already

Rating: Null/10 (11 November 2004)

I was riding a bus fitted out with a video screen when I saw Speed. The bus was the overnighter from Sarajevo to Zagreb, and I was rocking along in the upper deck as Keanu and the passengers rocked along in LA. I was in a nice new bus going through a bomb-shattered landscape, and Keanu was in a crummy old bus, with a bomb, going through, well, a more or less bomb-shattered landscape. I was trapped. He was trapped. I was tough. He was tough. I needed a bathroom break. He didn't seem to need one, but you couldn't really tell.
With Keanu, you never can really tell. He's the young Kevin Costner, an actor so wooden he resembles a newel post with eyes painted on. So here he is, trapped on the bus which (in case you've been off-planet for a while) has been rigged to explode if it goes under 50 mph (that's about 80 kph, if you live in a normal country).
The insufferably spunky Sandra Bullock was the passenger pressed into service as the driver. Why there's a cult of Sandra fans I'll never understand; the only theory I can generate is that she starred in a movie called 'The Net,' one of those things where Hollywood demonstrates its inabilily to grasp the real meaning of technology, and a bunch of geeks who showed up to make fun of it were swept off their feet. Thus are usenet newsgroups formed.
Anyway, before long I was wishing her bus would just crash. Failing that, I would have gladly settled for having my bus crash. Except I wanted to live, actually, if only to see Dennis Hopper in some other movie where his talents wouldn't be so ignobly wasted.