Hear Me Out: ‘Speed’ is the greatest action movie of the 1990s
In contemporary cinema, Keanu Reeves is appreciated as a bonafide action star just as much as Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Sylvester Stallone were back in the 1980s, but this wasn’t always the case. Whilst the aforementioned Hollywood icons were kicking serious ass in the ‘80s, Reeves was merely a baby-faced wannabe, appearing in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure where he was about as threatening as a dagger made out of mayonnaise.
Still, just as Schwarzenegger had owned the 1980s, Reeves would soon claim the following decade for himself, moving away from his gooey-eyed persona to take on a number of more challenging roles, embodying an FBI agent in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break in 1991 and a young police officer in Jan de Bont’s Speed three years later, creating some of the finest action movies of the decade before the ‘90s had even hit fifth gear.
Whilst the former is celebrated in its own right, Speed simply doesn’t get the attention it deserves for how bombastic, eccentric and electrifyingly enjoyable it truly is. Set mostly within the tin can confines of a Los Angeles transit bus, Reeves stars as a maverick rookie cop who tasks himself with preventing the vehicle from blowing up after an extortionist rigs it with a bomb set to explode if the automobile goes below 50mph.
The maniac behind the plot is Howard Payne, a dogged extortionist looking for a specific sum of $3.7million in order to bring a halt to his scheming. Played by Dennis Hopper, who relishes his chance to play a cartoon villain, Payne is the perfect antagonist for de Bont’s story, being a melodramatic nutter whose demands border insanity and logic. A twisted but methodically intelligent man, you can tell that there are several cogs and complicated psychological systems going on behind Payne’s eyes, with Hopper channelling the carnal lunacy of Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
In the space of just one short act, Hopper’s Payne is able to form a nasty nemesis in the form of Reeves’ Officer Jack Traven, a cop fueled with patriotic vigour whose dogged persistence goes well beyond his assumedly meagre pay grade. Boarding the bus after a high-speed pursuit, Payne finds a bus full of passengers and a certain plucky young woman named Annie Porter, played by Sandra Bullock, giving the determined, yet nevertheless horny, cop something else to fight for.
All whilst this is occurring, Payne periodically barks new orders and threats to the characters, with Hopper stamping his personality onto the film, becoming a larger-than-life threat in the face of the rather level-headed protagonists. It is this careful balance, where bombastic ‘90s action characters meet grounded elements of realism, that Speed thrives, creating an eccentric film which crosses familiar LAPD gun-slinging with the dynamism of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
Thanks to a sprinkling of cheesy ‘90s filmmaking onto a screenplay that fizzed with thrilling potential, Jan de Bont created an iconic piece of action cinema that fits together like a gridlocked traffic jam. Prioritising entertainment over anything else, Speed is a full-throttle destruction derby of joy where Dennis Hopper, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock are your sugar-pumped ringmasters.
