'Speed 2' bigger but not better than first one

'Speed 2' bigger but not better than first one

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Speed 2, Jan de Bont's sequel to the surprise
summer hit of 1994, only confirms that sequels are not
necessarily equals.

The premise follows a patented franchise formula: bigger but
not necessarily better. What was a well-crafted peril-on-a-bus
thriller is now a sloppy peril-on-a-luxury-cruise-ship giant
bore. Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock) is upset to find out that her
new boyfriend Alex Shaw (Jason Patric, Sleepers) is a daredevil
Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team member. She reminds him
that the reason she split up with Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves in
Speed) is that he was too "extreme".

To placate her, Alex produces two tickets for a luxury cruise
to the Caribbean. The scheme works. The Seabourn Legend is not
only magnificent, it also has John Geiger (Willem Dafoe), a
disgruntled former employee itching to ram it into an oil tanker
so that Bullock can scream some more, pick up her US$12.5 million
paycheck, and hopefully sign the third Speed contract. Soon
things start exploding, the engine is completely shut down, and
the countdown begins.

It would have been tolerable had Speed 2 been something more
in the order of Speed's cat-and-mouse dynamics, but it isn't.
Sure, the fundamentals are the same: good guy kills bad guy and
saves the day. Yet, what made the relationship between Jack
Traven and Howard Payne (played by Dennis Hopper) in Speed so
compelling was its intensely personal dimension. It was about
their characters loathing each other to such an extent that the
whole movie revolved around this hatred.

In Speed 2, Alex and Geiger hardly even interact. The acting
fares no better. Sandra Bullock shows that even everybody's
favorite bus driver cannot reprise what had been a fortuitously
perfect casting. Sure, she is now the star, and a hot enough
star to have a man written into the supporting role she performed
to such accolades in Speed.

Yet, in Speed 2, she serves hardly any function other than
answering our curiosity about her driver's license prospects (not
good) and ushering in a new hero boyfriend (interminably bland).
If her first Annie was plucky, her second is Bullock lite - full
of her own candy-floss trappings, but screamingly hollow at the
core.

Somewhere out there, Keanu Reeves -- who turned down Patric's
role in favor of touring with his band -- must be laughing.

Although frequently mocked as a wooden thespian, his blend of
lean physical beauty, matter-of-fact boyishness and total
involvement was entirely suited to the clean, competent and
streamlined project that was Speed. Meanwhile, his successor is
about as convincing as Chris O'Donnell playing Ernest Hemingway
when we see him tearing down a winding road on his 916 Ducati
motorcycle.

Although supposedly cut from the same cloth as Jack Traven,
Alex Shaw hardly inspires confidence. For the most part, he runs
around uncertain what to do, and when he finally does something,
we rarely see how he does it. Worse, he puts people's lives on
the line: once with the lifeboats (two people die), another
involving a lovesick girl (she nearly dies of flooding, thanks to
him), and in the mother-of-all-catastrophes (when he just looks
on, mouth agape, as the Seabourn Legend nosedives straight into
the heart of the French port town of St. Martin.)

Yet if Speed 2 crashes at the box office, it would not just be
due to Patric. Director Jan de Bont's much-publicized obsession
with surpassing his own standards (Twister, cinematography for
Die Hard and Flatliners) has resulted in a sloppy overdrive.

The pacing is slack, the editing choppy, the action unfocused.
Spatial relationships are hardly existent. One control room scene
has the camera pan through various faces like a giddy first
outing with the video-cam.

Each explosion sends the camera shaking and the light keeps on
flickering, tossing all hopes of clear visibility into the ocean
down yonder. Whither de Bont, who is first and foremostly a
cinematographer?

Graham Yost's script is peppered with dialog that hardly
strays from limp one-liners such as "Do something!", "We're
crashing!" and the all-encompassing "Oh s---t!" Scenes of
mayhem are poorly choreographed, with no regard for detail or
process. Human lives are dispensed with little, if any,
accompanying conscience. Annie further devalues them with
constant whining over her vacation-gone-awry.

Not to mention the level of absurdity. Would a ship keep
plying forward with all its engines shut down? Is that final
crash into the port town necessary? Having failed to create
suspense and an immediate sense of danger, the movie resorts to
mindless destruction. But, with $125 million to blow, something
simply had to give.

The supporting cast boasts not one character worth
remembering. Temuera Morrison makes a more convincing mutant in
The Island of Dr. Moreau than the ocean-liner's second-in-
command. He mostly spends his screen time staring vacantly at the
commotion around him. Brian McCardie, who plays the token
Scotsman, looks sufficiently distressed but is a long shot from
memorable.

Lastly, what of Willem Dafoe (Clear and Present Danger, The
English Patient), a character actor to boot? The role of the
psychotic but largely predictable Geiger is utterly beneath him
as he is accustomed to more demanding, complex roles. Yet he
oversupplies Geiger with unimpressive quirks and none of the
panache that we expect from an actor of his caliber.

Just like Annie's relationship with Alex, there's no heart,
intensity, or drama in the entire movie. Like Bullock and Patric,
who resolutely insist on playing themselves, this is a movie so
isolated in its self-importance that it has forgone all logic,
style and conviction.