Cinema
Speed 2: Cruise Control (PG, selected cinemas)
Disaster fatigue
Mark Steyn
Just when you thought it 'was safe to go back into the water ... it is! After the origi- nal Speed, in which Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves had to get the bomb off a speeding Los Angeles bus at rush hour, Jan De Bont has now brought us Speed 2: Cruise Control.
In place of Dennis Hopper, there is another psychopathic mastermind Willem Dafoe, playing a man called Geiger — with another crazy scheme — to slam a liner into the side of an oil tanker; in place of Dennis Hopper's booby-trapped bus, there is not so much as a booby-trapped Camden Hoppa, only a strangely uncon- vincing cruise ship which looks like a float- ing refrigerator. Speed-wise, it's reminiscent of that swimming quarter-final in the 1990 Commonwealth Games in which the Swazi competitor, for various complicated reasons, found himself padding up and down the pool in a swim- ming heat all by himself. 'Swaziland not best known for its swimming,' mused the commentator, as the cheerfully unhurried Swazi moved slowly up an otherwise empty pool at roughly half the speed of my grand- mother. So it goes here. Speed 2 is notable mainly for its lack of speed: its cruise ship is the Saga Holiday of disaster movies. On present form, Speed 3 will feature Sandra Bullock trapped on a runaway sloth; Speed 4 will have her trapped in a Robin Reliant hurtling towards a mini-roundabout at 17 mph; Speed 5 will see her trapped in a long Post Office queue, forced to watch videos advertising attractive new Parcel Force envelopes.
Meanwhile, those of us trapped in Speed 2 find ourselves mourning the absence of Keanu Reeves, star of the first Speed and the only one to show any speed with regard to the second: he couldn't wait to get out of it. Keanu is frequently mocked for his dis- tinctive forename, but it seems to me a lot less bizarre than that of his replacement, Jason Patric. I could swear I worked with a Jason Patric back in my disc-jockey days, or maybe it was Patrick Jason. Disc-jockeys frequently adopt two forenames in order to get personality jingles on the cheap chopping off the first bit of 'Patrick Antho- ny!' and the last bit of 'Anthony Jason!' to make 'Jason Patric! The World's Most Fabulous Human Being!!' etc. Jason Patric is a bit like that — a composite of various types of leading man without ever being, as the great Keanu indubitably is, anything in his own right.
Sandra Bullock, on the other hand, was offered $12.5 million to reprise her charac- ter of Annie. Why on earth would anybody in his right mind sign such a cheque? No one had heard of her until the first Speed three years ago and the record since then has been decidedly patchy: While You Were Sleeping, a romantic comedy, and The Net, a cyber-thriller, were both hits, but Two If by Sea, with Denis Leary, and In Love and War, with Chris O'Donnell as an hilariously miscast Ernest Hemingway, were el stinko flopperoos.
Miss Bullock is one of those actresses who seem built for the silver screen: in real life, the aquiline nose, sculpted cheekbones and cleft chin are all too prominent; on film, though, she fills the screen, as a sort of stylised version of wholesomeness. Unfortunately, the audience only cares for Sandra Bullock when she's a plucky can-do heroine with a touch of vulnerability; best of all, it likes plenty of shots of her bottom running for its life down corridors. In that sense, this is the best Sandra Bullock pic- ture since The Net. Yet, in the United States at least, it's failed to restore to her stalled career the momentum of a couple of seasons ago. She may be on her way to joining that elite and enviable club of stars who are paid ever more ludicrous sums for pictures no one on the planet wants to know about (see Demi Moore).
As it is, perhaps the speediest thing about Speed 2 is the way, in just a couple of years, De Bont, Bullock and all concerned have accelerated to the same level of fatigue it took John Cleese and co a decade to achieve in the Fish Called Wanda sequel. The best bit is right at the end, a final stunt in which Patric Jason (or vice-versa) is called upon to harpoon a seaplane. But, otherwise, the film is full of all manner of odd touches, including a weird reliance on twitchy, handheld camera shots. Presum- ably, this is to give you that rather wobbly, unbalanced sensation of being at sea. In fact, it just winds up giving you the distinct- ly queasy feeling that you're watching a dis- aster movie that's been hijacked by an art-house director. Come to think of it, that's not a bad premise for a disaster movie in itself.
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