Rewind Files: Speed is a Bad Movie. Why Aren’t More Movies Like Speed?

Rewind Files is when we take a second look at a piece of media to gain a better sense of its greatness, its awfulness, or its place in the cultural landscape. 

Speed is 30-percent a good movie, 35-percent a bad movie, and 35-percent a so-good-it’s-bad movie. All of these qualities emerge in the movie’s premise: A terrorist puts a bomb on a bus and the bomb explodes if the bus goes under 50 miles per hour. About a third of that sounds very fun, another third sounds very stupid, and another third sounds very eh-but-I’d-see-it-anyway. Based on its plot alone, Speed has a firm place in the cheesy 1990s era of action movies, but that capital hasn’t led to a lot of movies like Speed, and that, regardless of how you feel about Speed itself, is a tough loss.

Speed doesn’t start how you think it starts. The bus doesn’t come into play until about the 30-minute mark. Instead, there’s a hostage sequence where Keanu Reeves and Jeff Daniels, as two LAPD cops, try to free some civilians from a plunging elevator while a small-time terrorist tries to blow the whole rig to smithereens. It’s a very unnecessary half-hour because it serves to introduce the movie’s villain and establish the personalities of Keanu and Jeff (does Keanu have a personality in real life?), but Speed could have done those things through the bus situation, so the whole elevator thing feels a bit like we’re, um, spinning our wheels. It’s a bit boring and uncreative, the part of Speed that’s normal-bad.

The part of Speed that is fun-bad is pretty much everything else (Sandra Bullock is the one objective “good” part, and while that isn’t enough quantitatively to be 30-percent of the movie, it’s enough qualitatively to be 30-percent, if that follows). The bus-bomb gimmick is simple, but the writers wring it absolutely dry. The bus has to dodge a traffic jam. The bus has to go on residential streets and navigate civilian crosswalks. The bus has a fuel shortage. Someone goes under the bus. The bus goes over a jump. It’s delightful. By the midpoint of the movie, vehicles are coming up to the side of the bus and cruising alongside it and having conversations with Keanu while he’s on the bus and they’re in another car. Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off makes an appearance. These are all fun things.

And you know what, while there are also a bunch of super idiotic things in Speed (multiple people are dragged under and/or alongside speeding vehicles without taking any damage), it’s still a totally-fine two hours and was probably a pretty awesome afternoon at the movies back in 1994. There’s some good bro-out dude moments and some nice grab-onto-your-SO moments. You’ll probably laugh. You’ll shake your head wryly. It’s fresh in that sense; most movies aren’t that simple anymore.

Earlier in the summer, we talked about the smooth ease of Baby Driver, and how it’s refreshing to see something in a theater that isn’t worried about franchise obligations and isn’t just out to bank on a ton of cash. B-movies like Speed work in the same way. There’s no message, there’s no continuity, there’s just cheap thrills (literally) and breezy entertainment. The issue is that Hollywood doesn’t want anything to breeze by these days, so fun one-off movies like Speed are, to use an ironic turn of phrase, left in the dust.

What might come to replace the action cheapies like Speed, based on what we’ve seen the past couple years, are horror movies. We’ve had two dumb-fun shark-attack thrillers recently (the actually-awesome The Shallows in 2016, then the Mandy Moore-starring 47 Meters Down in 2017), M. Night Shymalan has returned to form through popcorn-premise flicks like this year’s Split and 2015’s The Visit, and then there was the totally absurd (but still glorious) home-invasion riff Don’t Breathe last year. There’s all the Purge movies, too (can we go much cornier than Election Year??). The horror movies sitting on the second shelf nowadays, so to speak, are positively gleeful in their twisty premises and hook-you-in-a-minute plots. They’re fun to watch, easy to pitch, and they’re raking in cash.

It makes you wish action movies were taking the same approach. Horror movies like Don’t Breathe and The Purge and Split are great because they seem to be made in response to your ticket price: Pay your $10, and we’ll handle the rest. We’ll make you jump a few times and clutch the arms of your seat and maybe we’ll coax a nice groan or two out of you if we show something really gross. It’ll be fun! These movies don’t set the bar very high for themselves, so when we watch them, we feel like they succeeded. Action movies, though, are trying to set the bar high then still leap over it. It’s not having the same effect.

The first John Wick movie works because the bar is low and that movie practically steps over it. The sequel still manages to clear, but it takes a little more effort. Atomic Blonde, which at a glance should have B-movie written all over it, cools its adrenaline with a nonsensical spy plot and some italicized themes. That’s not why people are there. Even movies like Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island, which likewise deliver huge spectacle on the action front, can’t seem to shake off the sense of responsibility to say something about “the world today.” I don’t want a giant-lizard movie to draw a parable about climate change or species endangerment or industrialization, I just want to see him step on the throats of giant insects. Don’t look to exceed our expectations; just look to give us our money’s worth.  

And that’s the best lesson we can take from Speed: It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for easy money as long as you play the greatest hits. Give us some explosions and some near-escapes and a slack-jawed, sweaty Keanu looking over his shoulder in desperation. Give me something where it’s okay to look away for a moment and rummage through the popcorn bucket, or miss a line of dialogue because I’m shaking the candy box for a bottom-sticking cookie-dough bite. All I ask is a reason to care about the action and some things to fill in the blank on this sentence: “Man, wasn’t it cool when _______ ?”  

I don’t need every night at the movies to change me. Hollywood isn’t always the greatest mentor, so sometimes, it should shake the social responsibilities, kick back, and live a little. For a system that cares more about work than play these days, it would be fun to have a reminder every now and then that the institution can still go hard, drive fast, and raise some hell.