Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) Review
3/10
Speed works because a bus can’t slow down. Everything in that film derives from one rule stated in the first act: below fifty miles an hour, the bomb detonates. The sequel puts a comparable problem on an ocean liner. That has a top speed of around thirty knots and needs several miles to change course. The premise is dead on arrival and everybody involved appears to have known it.
I find this one more exasperating than bad. Speed is close to a perfect action machine, and watching its sequel putter along at cruise-ship pace makes me want to grab somebody at the studio by the lapels. Everybody in it is a professional, and not one of them could fix the thing they were handed.
Sandra Bullock has said publicly and repeatedly that she made it as a favor to the studio and that she knew during production it wasn’t working. Keanu Reeves read the script and declined. The 3 is for a professionally made film with a fatal conceptual error and one spectacular practical stunt. Willem Dafoe is trying, Bullock is stranded, the film asks Jason Patric to replace Reeves and he can’t, and the plot is a hostage situation with a boat attached.
Why It Cannot Work
A bus is small, fast and surrounded by obstacles. Every second contains a corner, a junction, a gap in a freeway, another vehicle. The premise generates a problem continuously and for free.
A liner is enormous, slow, and surrounded by water. There’s nothing to hit for hours and no way to hit it suddenly. The same premise generates a long wait. The film knows this and compensates by adding material Speed didn’t need. A hijacking. A hostage plot. A villain with a grievance against the cruise line and a copper poisoning. A subplot about a marriage proposal. A deaf teenager. None of it is bad and all of it is there because the central situation produces nothing. The result is that the title becomes a joke. There’s no speed and there’s no control, and the film’s most exciting sequence involves a very large object moving at walking pace.
The proposal subplot loses me for good. I’d have cut it on the first day of the rewrite, and every added thread made me more aware of how little the boat itself was doing. The original’s set pieces all come from the rule. The gap in the freeway, the passenger who has to be transferred, the arithmetic of the turn at the airport. Not one of them is an addition; each is a consequence. This film’s set pieces are all additions, and additions feel added.
The sequel problem again, and the clearest example available. Speed’s premise was a constraint, not a setting, and moving the setting while dropping the constraint produces something with the same brand and none of the machinery.
The step people skip is separating the two. Ask what the original film or book was about at the level of rule instead of situation. Speed is about a vehicle that can’t decelerate. Buses, Los Angeles and the bomb can all change; the rule can’t.
The test is to state your premise in the form of a restriction and check whether your continuation preserves it. If your restriction is that a character can’t go home, can’t tell the truth, or can’t stop moving, the sequel has to keep that or find an equally binding one. If your sequel’s answer is a new threat instead of a persistent restriction, you’re writing this film.
The Marina Sequence
They did it for real. A decommissioned liner, the Seaward, driven into a real marina built for the purpose, at cost, and the collision was filmed practically.
For about four minutes the film is impressive and the impressiveness is entirely a matter of scale. Something very large destroys something else slowly, and it’s real, and no digital version of that shot from 1997 would have worked at all.
The buildup is well handled too. The evacuation, the arithmetic of how far the ship will travel, the people on the dock realizing what’s about to happen.
It also shows the whole problem in one sequence. The best scene in a film called Speed 2 is a ship moving at a slow walk toward a fixed target, and the tension comes from inevitability instead of velocity. That marina crash is the only reason this gets a 3 from me and doesn’t sink lower. Somebody drove a real ship into a real dock and filmed it. Good for them. It’s the one stretch of the film where I stopped checking the clock.
There’s an argument that the film should have been built entirely around this. A liner that can’t be stopped and will arrive somewhere in six hours is a real premise, and the film has it and buries it under a hostage plot.
The stunt reportedly consumed a considerable share of a budget reported at somewhere between one hundred and ten and one hundred and sixty million dollars. That’s why it looks the way it does.
What the Original Understood
Speed is about as well built as action premises get, and I think it’s worth studying because the sequel shows the negative.
One rule, stated clearly in the first act, generating every later scene. The bus can’t go below fifty. Therefore the freeway gap. Therefore the injured passenger who can’t be moved conventionally. Therefore the airport, because it’s empty runways and space to circle.
Every complication is a consequence. That means the film never has to invent anything, and an audience never catches it arranging events.
It also has a second rule that people forget: the villain is watching, so the characters can’t be seen to be solving it. That restriction generates the whole middle section.
Graham Yost wrote it, with major uncredited work by Joss Whedon on the dialogue, and Jan de Bont directed both films. That’s the interesting part. The same director made the good one and the bad one, and the difference is entirely in the premise.
That should be reassuring to any writer. It’s not talent that separates these two films. It’s one structural decision made early.
A premise that generates its own complications is worth more than any amount of invention, and the difference is visible to readers even when they can’t name it. Consequences feel inevitable. Additions feel scheduled.
The construction method is to state your restriction and then derive instead of invent. Ask what this rule makes impossible, then put your characters in a situation where they must do the impossible thing. That’s a scene you didn’t have to think of, because the premise thought of it.
Take your last five plot developments and label each one either consequence or addition. A consequence follows from the rules already established. An addition is a new element introduced because the story needed something to happen. If most of your list is additions, the premise isn’t doing its job, and you can usually fix that by tightening the restriction instead of adding more events.
De Bont’s Career as a Case Study
Jan de Bont was a cinematographer before he directed, having shot Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October and Basic Instinct. It’s an extraordinary run.
Speed was his first film as director and it’s close to perfectly constructed. Twister followed and made a great deal of money on a similar principle: a physical threat with rules that the characters have to work around. Then this, then The Haunting in 1999, then Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life in 2003, and he hasn’t directed a feature since.
The pattern is that the two successes both have a physical premise with clear rules, and the three failures all have premises that are situations. A haunted house has no rules. A treasure hunt has no rules. A cruise ship being hijacked has no rules. That’s a considerably more useful reading of a career than talent rising and falling, and it suggests de Bont was excellent at one thing and was given projects that didn’t require it.
He was also, by every account, a superb cameraman, and Speed looks better than an action film of its budget should.
Dafoe Is in a Different Film
Willem Dafoe plays John Geiger, a former cruise line computer engineer who suffered copper poisoning on the job, was denied compensation, and has come back for the money.
That’s a properly constructed villain motive. It’s specific, it’s documented, it gives him expertise directly relevant to the crime, and it makes him more sympathetic than the company he’s stealing from.
Dafoe plays it seriously and the performance is out of scale with everything around it. He’s a real illness, real grievance and a plan that makes sense, in a film where the protagonists are having a conversation about a marriage proposal.
His best material is the leeches. Geiger treats himself with medical leeches on screen, matter-of-factly, and the detail is doing exactly what a good specific detail should: telling you he’s dying, that he’s managing it himself, and that he’s beyond caring how it looks. None of this is used. The film needs an antagonist to drive the plot and has one with an argument, and never lets him make it to anybody who might listen.
He’s the only person in the film who appears to have read a different, better script, and there’s a version of this picture that’s about him. Dafoe is the part of this film I’d keep. The leeches are creepy and sad at the same time, and I’d happily watch the movie where he gets to argue his case against the cruise line. Instead he gets a hostage plot and a lot of shouting, and it’s a damn waste of the best actor on the boat.
A villain with a documented grievance against an institution the audience also dislikes is a considerable asset and it has to be used or it becomes a liability. Geiger is more sympathetic than the cruise line, and the film never permits him a scene where anybody engages with his case.
The reason this matters is that an unanswered good argument sits in the reader’s mind and undermines the resolution. If your antagonist is right about something and nobody addresses it, the ending reads as the powerful winning instead of as justice, whatever the film thinks it’s showing.
Write your antagonist’s best speech, the one where they lay out their case at full strength to somebody who might be persuaded, and then decide whether it belongs in the book. If it does, put it in and let a protagonist answer it properly. If you can’t write a protagonist’s answer, you’ve discovered that your antagonist is correct and the story needs rethinking.
Should you watch Speed 2?
Watch the marina sequence, four minutes of real practical spectacle that’s easy to find online, and skip the rest. I’m giving it a 3 because the people who made it were good at their jobs and still couldn’t make a slow boat exciting, and that failure became inevitable the day somebody picked a cruise liner. Then go watch Speed again and notice how little in it had to be invented.
