Only now does it occur to me... SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL (1997)

Only now does it occur to me... that they should've named this picture after a phrase which appears on screen about an hour and twenty minutes in:

"SPEED 2: SPEED MALFUNCTION."

Yes, despite Jan de Bont's workmanlike direction (you likely know him best as Paul Verhoeven's and John McTiernan's cinematographer), a denouement involving a $25 million setpiece with a cruise ship crashing into Saint Martin ("the most expensive stunt ever filmed"),

 

 and Willem Dafoe's finest crazyface (throughout),

this thing is the mess that everyone says it is. Witness my disdain by enjoying these screen captures taken from a VHS, which I photographed off of my television set. 

Anyway, SPEED 2 follows two of my ironclad 1990s rules: one of which is It Takes Place on a Boat, and the other being "if it's a SPEED movie, it must star a David Lynch villain as the Big Bad." In this instance, obviously, it's WILD AT HEART's Willem Dafoe gobbling the scenery. He plays a computer hacking leech enthusiast

with a caddy bag full of golf club bombs

and a nefarious plan to throw Bo Svenson overboard, steal some jewels (?), and ram a cruise ship into an oil tanker. When you first lay eyes on the shopping mall aboard this cruise ship, you find yourself rooting for Dafoe.

Anyway, Keanu Reeves has been replaced by Jason Patric (THE LOST BOYS, SOLARBABIES), 

and if Sandra Bullock wasn't in it (seen here wielding a chainsaw in her only moment of agency), you would have no reason to believe this was a SPEED film. The supporting cast is of a shockingly high pedigree: Temuera Morrison (ONCE WERE WARRIORS, THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT)

Please, sir, I beg you, watch ONCE WERE WARRIORS instead

the aforementioned Bo Svenson (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, KILL BILL VOL. 2),  Colleen Camp (CLUE, WAYNE'S WORLD, POLICE ACADEMY 2), Joe Morton (THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, "Miles Dyson" in TERMINATOR 2), Glenn Plummer (SHOWGIRLS, MENACE II SOCIETY), and Kimmy Robertson (Lucy from TWIN PEAKS, LEPRECHAUN 2) as "Liza the Cruise Director."

Which is probably a bizarre enough note to end this on. Anyway. SPEED 2.

Only now does it occur to me... SPEED (1994)

Only now does it occur to me... that the SPEED franchise shares peculiar connections with the David Lynch universe. Now: to merely cite that it contains Dennis Hopper doing a poor man's Frank Booth from BLUE VELVET
 
is obviously not enough, because most post-1986 Hopper villains are some variation on "poor man's Frank Booth."


We could go the philosophical route and examine how Hopper's retired cop character is a corrupted, insane, dark-side-of-the-mirror version of Keanu Reeves' young, clean-cut, and aggressively Boy Scout-ish cop––in a similar way to how Hopper's and Kyle MacLachlan's characters mirror each other in BLUE VELVET... or we could point out Hopper's penchant in both instances for calling himself "Daddy":

...or the gruesome particulars of how each of these Hopper villains makes their exit:

"He lost his head."  –Keanu Reeves

Or we could consider the fact that SPEED 1 takes its villain from BLUE VELVET and that SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL casts Willem Dafoe as its baddie (who was the villain of Lynch's WILD AT HEART). Does this mean that if there ever were a third film, let's say, SPEED 3: FAST AND LOOSE, that the villain would have to be Robert Blake, portraying his character from LOST HIGHWAY?

Only now does it occur to me... DEMOLITION MAN

Continuing with the theme of Sandra Bullock-themed sci-fi–

I have weighed in on the glory that is DEMOLITION MAN before, but I must add this:

Only now does it occur to me... that this particular title card

so beautifully brought together the arthouse, the grindhouse, and the statehouse– and between Stallone's glistening pecs!  It's like when you have two separate circles of friends and suddenly, you see them...  hanging out without you.  It reminds me of this fantastic title card, which fused George A. Romero and Menahem Golan together forever– at least in celluloid form.  Anyway, carry on.

Only now does it occur to me... GRAVITY

Only now does it occur to me...  that the glory of 3-D has brought us a giant ape flinging boulders right at me and Jason Voorhees squeezing a man's head until the eyeball shoots out.  It's shown us Freddy Krueger, Michael Ironside, and even Charles Bronson in three-dimensions.  I've even seen blue cat people have strongly-implied weirdo hair sex.  But never did I ever expect to be...   
SPLOOSHED IN THE FACE WITH SANDRA BULLOCK'S CGI SPACE-TEARS!!!

 

Let me make this brief and relatively spoiler-free:  while GRAVITY indeed boasts some incredible visuals, its manipulative attempts at emotional depth are in general clumsy, unearned, and give off the overwhelming impression that they've been scraped together from the afterglow of superior movies (DON'T LOOK NOW?  APOLLO 13?).  Sadly, this cannot be remedied by an Ed Harris vocal cameo (he gets about 10 minutes of screentime, tops) or any number of George HaClooncinations, even when he does his best Doug Ross impersonation.

[It's also worth mentioning that Sandra Bullock's numerous wardrobe changes– from spacesuit into hot pants/tank top and back again– flavor the film with a "peekaboo– gym bod!" salaciousness that distracts from the narrative drive and nearly suggests a sexploitation movie, which gave rise to the idea that I'd much rather have seen a GRAVITY that was made in the 1970s, starring Pam Grier and Sid Haig!]

Perhaps I made a mistake in watching it nearly back-to-back with one of my all-time favorite 'survival journey' movies, THE WAGES OF FEAR, a film that that firmly balances character development and white knuckle thrills with virtuosic integrity; conversely, GRAVITY's mushier than a melty banana split (and I don't mean one made with astronaut ice cream!). 

Hell, I don't mean to shit on this thing; it seems that many have derived genuine emotional responses from it, including some teary-eyed patrons at my local theater.  Perhaps ours is a fragmented era of ramshackle profundities, where the existential hum can be quieted with a pat on the shoulder and a few empty platitudes.  Perhaps the legacy of cosmic wonder and moral wisdom forged by writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke has merely become... CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE ASTRONAUT SOUL.  Now that makes me sad.  I s'pose you succeeded after all, GRAVITY!

In closing, for its unsubtle attempts at emotional button-pushing and a visual vocabulary that consists of objects hovering slowly across the frame, I think perhaps a better title may have been: