Best Keanu: “You have a hair trigger aimed at your head. What do you do. What do you do.”

Speed is fantastic.

This isn’t news to most of the world. But since I’d gone 28 years with no interest whatsoever in seeing this movie (there’s a bomb on a bus and they can’t stop driving. Why would I want to see that), I feel like I should get the obvious point out of the way.

Speed was probably fantastic in 1994. I wouldn’t know, because at the time I was often locked in my dorm room listening to this and never would have emerged just to see a Keanu Reeves action movie. It’s also fantastic in 2022 — there’s nothing obvious to date this movie, save the plastic bus seats that pull me back to a random time in my memory.

Of course, you could criticize Speed by saying the Sandra Bullock character doesn’t have much to do except drive the bus, act terrified, and fawn over Keanu Reeves. But who wouldn’t be terrified in that scenario, and why shouldn’t she fawn over Keanu — it is a movie, after all, and he was jacked as fuck.

Speed is pure action, so while Point Break claims to be an action movie, Speed actually delivers. It’s exciting, interesting action — fast enough to provide movement but slow enough that you can actually see what’s going on. The pacing is close to perfect. Although at the end I was like, “ok, you can stop now” — the subway crashing on an unfinished track was a bit over the top — it was a purely satisfying adventure.

There’s a great villain in Speed, who’s just complex enough to make things interesting and to introduce a few unknowns. Plus, he’s played by Dennis Hopper. It’s nice to give a bit of a mental shout-out to Hopper, one of Hollywood’s notorious kind-of-crazy dudes. I never did see Easy Rider, so that’s now on my list of movies to eventually make the time to watch, when I’ve finally ticked everything off the Keanu filmography (but maybe before).

There’s one last thing I want to say about Speed. Let’s hear it for public transit. Speed does a wonderful job of creating an environment on that bus that reflects a pretty typical morning commute. It’s a distinct departure from how transit — subways in particular — are usually used in movies, as nothing more than a moving box where no one can go in or out, and shit is bound to happen.

In Speed, you see Sandra Bullock’s Annie chatting with the driver and her fellow passengers. One is an annoying tourist. Another is on the bus because she can no longer stand to drive on the freeway. Annie misses being able to drive her car — but as we later learn, she lost her license for speeding. A young man is armed and pulls a gun on Keanu’s Jack Traven — because he’s committed a crime, or something.

The people on the bus give Jack something to do besides hold up his badge and point his gun. He consoles and deescalates at different points during the ride. It makes the character richer, more compelling to watch. It’s also what happens if you spend any time at all in the world, on public transportation. People don’t just hang out like props.

Maybe in 1994 and the years since, I assumed they would, which is why I never bothered to spend two hours watching Speed until a late night in February 2022. But that’s for the best — to experience a crazy good film like it’s new, when you’re ready for some real entertainment.

March 2022