Speed (1994)
LA cop Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) is a shoot first, think last kind of guy. His bold actions in the line of duty serve him well after he stops a mad bomber (Dennis Hooper) from taking down an elevator full of people. Thinking the villain is dead and he’s saved the day, Jack is just enjoying his day off when a bus blows up behind him. Answering a call from the villain he thought dead, Jack recieves a simple task “There’s a bomb on another bus. If the bus’s speed reaches 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50 miles, it explodes. What do you do?”
Such a brilliant premise for a film, and if you thought it couldn’t be stretched to movie length, think again. Jack leaps aboard the bus, and with the help of passenger Annie (Sandra Bullock) behind the wheel, they speed around the city streets and freeways of LA, dodging cars and people, flying through the air and trying not to get blown up. Hang on!
Speed was
an original action film in almost every way. Sure, we’d seen plenty movies
about cops playing a game of cat and mouse with a mad villain, who usually
wanted to blow shit up. But to place the action on a bus, and keep it there for
almost 90 minutes had never been done before.
You could say movies like “Die Hard” paved the way for Speed, where your
everyman kind of character finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time,
and against great odds manages to save the day.
While the action movies of the 80’s were populated with the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone – one man killing machines taking down entire army’s or drug cartels – audiences were all too familiar with that and looking for something fresh. “The Matrix” was still five years away, so in the meantime we were treated to this bonafide classic which took a setting we are all familiar with – a public bus – and places it at the heart of the action. Filled with characters who were just your normal, everyday people experiencing the unluckiest bus ride of their life, and movies had a new formula to replicate. It proved that you could make actions movies real and believable, and that the possibilities were endless.
The action
films of the 90’s were a mixed bag, as the genre was evolving from what we knew
into something we didn’t know yet. Of course, it all changed in 1999 with The
Matrix, but at the time Speed took a risk and it paid off. It made Keanu Reeves
an action star and washed away his surfer-stoner image he’d perfected since the
days of Bill and Ted, and gave Sandra Bullock her first major role that launched
her career.
Speed still
stands as a classic action film; pure escapism and white-knuckled excitement
from start to finish. It doesn’t let up for one minute, and wrote the book on
how to take a simple idea for a film; one scenario, one main character and one
setting – and do it right. It continues to show the importance of the Everyman
character arc in films, which connected to the audience more personally than
the muscular, unstoppable action guys that were larger than life, but somehow
unreachable. Kean Reeves was just your young, good looking guy from the 80’s,
who was still finding his acting chops at the time, but would ride this wave
two more times with The Matrix, and his third action hero resurgence in 2014
with “John Wick”.
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