This is the fourth in my 2019 monthly series revisiting, or possibly visiting for the first time, movies I think I've seen but may not have.The fourth movie in Audient Audit is not only a case of setting the record straight, it's a case of righting an injustice.
Speed 2: Cruise Control is the first movie in this series that I know, with 100% certainty, that I did not properly watch. Yet it made it onto my lists anyway.
What's more, I ranked it as the worst movie I saw in 1997 -- when by any reasonable standard I did not actually see it. And that's the injustice I'm trying to correct this month.
The circumstance is that I was on a plane with my family. Given the timing I suspect it was my cousin's wedding, since I'd already graduated from college and would not have otherwise regularly been traveling with them at that age. These were well before the days when you had your own seatback entertainment, so everyone was forced to watch, or not watch as the case may be, the same movie.
The choice on this particular flight was Speed 2: Cruise Control, a bit of an odd choice for the plane given that it involves a passenger vessel in jeopardy, and even finishes with a plane crash of sorts.
I landed somewhere between watching it and not watching it.
You had to pay for headphones, and I didn't. But I still watched most, if not all, of the movie. I just didn't hear any of the dialogue or the explosions.
Clearly I thought I devoted enough of my attention to the movie to say that I saw it, and film is, after all, designed as primarily a visual medium. It would be a successful realization of a film's mission statement if you could watch it with the sound off and still say you had seen and understood everything that happened.
But the reality is, you haven't really seen a movie if you haven't heard it. Things that seem vaguely ridiculous out of the context of their spoken dialogue -- which was most of Speed 2 for me -- may come across as much more reasonable when watched as they were designed to be watched. "Show don't tell" is a great guiding principle for making movies, but if you don't expect to be able to tell something, you make different choices about how you are going to show it. Speed 2 was not designed to be watched silently, and for this it cannot be blamed.
Besides, this movie is damn near two hours long. Is it really possible that I watched the whole thing?
What's likely is that I took in 60% of the images and 0% of the dialogue, which, in a flawed bit of math, computes to a movie that was 30% watched. But I must have been really desperate to get credit for it, and I felt I could assess its terribleness just from the images. So indeed, I ranked it that year, and I ranked it 39th out of the 39 movies I saw in time for my ranking deadline.
Once those year-end lists are finalized I don't ever touch them again, so I'm not going to go back and remove Speed 2 from the Microsoft Word file "1997 film rankings." But a second viewing might improve Speed 2's ultimate standing in my Flickchart, where its value is being periodically reassessed through random duels against other movies. It is currently ranked 4,557th out of 4,883, and it was time to determine if that was really fair or not.
For starters, I'd like to say that Speed 2 deserves points for cheekiness alone. The title Cruise Control is a bit of punning genius. Not only does it describe the plot of the movie in about as few words as you can imagine, but it riffs on a familiar setting in most cars that governs the vehicle's speed. The filmmakers had to have been laughing when they came up with it, and I appreciate that a lot more now than I did in 1997. It's even possible that they came up with the title before they came up with the script itself, though I'm not going to look that up for confirmation.
Secondly, I might have almost put Speed 2 in a position to not get a proper second watch. I chose to start it around 9:30 after getting home from another movie, Shazam!, which I watched with my eight-year-old on the Thursday night before our four-day Easter weekend. Suffice it to say that with naps factored in, I did not finish the movie until after 1 a.m. However, I did pause the movie every time I took one of those naps.
As I've spent so much time on preamble, and this is, in the end, a pretty undemanding and straightforward action movie, I won't give you a lot of detail about what works and what doesn't in Speed 2. I will say, however, that it's really no worse than a mediocre action movie, something I probably would have given two stars if rating it for the first time today. Indeed, when you just look up every once in a while and see things exploding without any context, you aren't really making an honest assessment of what the filmmakers have done. Which goes without saying.
I will say that the movie doesn't properly use Sandra Bullock, which may have been inevitable. Bullock broke out as one of Hollywood's most charismatic actresses almost entirely on the basis of her extremely winning performance in the original Speed. And sure, Keanu Reeves was doing all the heavy lifting in terms of the physical action, just as Jason Patric does here. But Bullock's role in driving a bus above 50 miles per hour at all times was absolutely indispensable to that movie. She was the stationary ying to Reeves' mobile yang, and one could not have existed without the other.
Here she's kind of left at loose ends, more making John McClane-style wisecracks about having been through all this before than playing a central role in the current scenario. Oh, she does some heroic stuff, like using a chainsaw (why is there a chainsaw on a cruise liner?) to open a locked door and free a bunch of trapped passengers from imminent death. She's also good at keeping a level head and corralling people where they need to go. But you don't get the sense she's the difference between the life and death of these passengers, as she was in Speed.
It might have been too obvious an approach to give her the same exact role, where her presence at the boat's controls made the crucial difference. But sequels often reproduce dynamics from the original wholesale without us taking them to task. When Speed 2 does decide to repeat a scenario from the first movie, it's by having the villain take her captive in the final 20 minutes, a choice that feels even less useful in our current age, where men saving women from peril is frowned upon to say the least. Sure, Bullock's Annie does show agency once she's in the clutches of Willem Dafoe's villain, but the ending of the original Speed is by far its weakest passage, and that's no less true here.
Let's talk about Dafoe's villain for a moment. Sure, Dennis Hopper rigged a lot of things to explode in the first movie, but Dafoe's control over every opening and closing door on the ship -- which he can manipulate through punching a few seemingly random keys on a control panel he wears on his wrist -- really stretches credibility. You might argue that credibility is not the strong suit of this series in general, but it's thrown out the window entirely in the second movie.
I did appreciate the climax for the most part, though, first the attempt to avoid ramming the oil tanker, then the collision with the Saint Martin port. There was a lot of production bravado, and I dare say money, in that finale, and there can't help but be something comical in the way the cruise ship plows through all the boaters and other pleasure seekers on the shore. I think this movie has its tongue in its cheek more than I thought it did.
I can't go back and rewrite history, but I did think it would be charitable to list the movies that came out in 1997 that I would rank lower than Speed 2 if I were ranking them today. I won't limit it to movies I saw at the time, as that will increase the number of movies Speed 2 is better than. Here they are:
Absolute Power
Addicted to Love
Air Bud
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
B.A.P.S.
Batman & Robin
Booty Call
Event Horizon
Fools Rush In
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Julian Po
Jungle 2 Jungle
Playing God
She's So Lovely
Trial and Error
Volcano
Congratulations, Speed 2, you're not nearly as terrible as I thought you were.
One final thought on my 1997 film rankings. I must have noticed this sometime before now, but if I have, I've forgotten. Both my favorite movie of the year (Titanic) and my least favorite movie of the year (Speed 2) are about oceanliners in peril. This exercise has proven the flaws in that initial assessment, but as I said, the record stands as it did in January of 1998.
Okay, on to a more typical "did I or didn't I?" choice in May.
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