'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.