Speed (film)

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Speed

Directed by	Jan de Bont
Produced by	Mark Gordon
Written by	Graham Yost Joss Whedon (uncredited)
Starring	Keanu Reeves Sandra Bullock Dennis Hopper Joe Morton and Jeff Daniels
Cinematography	Andrzej Bartkowiak
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	June 10, 1994 (USA)
Running time	116 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$28,000,000 US (est.)
Followed by	Speed 2: Cruise Control
IMDb profile

Speed is a 1994 action film directed by Jan de Bont, starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Joe Morton and Jeff Daniels. The film is a high concept film about a bomb on a bus. It is considered Bullock's breakout role. ^{[citation needed]}

In 1995 Speed won an Academy Award for Best Sound and Best Sound Effects. The film was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.^[1]

1 Plot summary
2 Notes
3 Parodies
4 External links
- 4.1 Reviews
5 References

[edit] Plot summary

The story is about a Los Angeles police officer (Keanu Reeves) who has to stop an insane bomber/extortionist (Dennis Hopper) who has rigged a bomb on a public transit bus (a Santa Monica Intercity Bus Lines GM TDH-5303 New Look bus, which looks similar to City of Santa Monica Big Blue Bus). The film is often cited as an excellent example of a high concept film: "a bomb on a bus."

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Jack Traven (Reeves) is a hot-shot Los Angeles police S.W.A.T. officer who is willing to do unconventional things to resolve hostage situations. Howard Payne (Hopper) tries to extort money by threatening to send an elevator full of people plummeting to the ground, using remote controlled explosives attached to the cable. Jack and his partner Harry (Daniels) foil his plan and nearly catch him. Payne takes Harry hostage, only to have Jack shoot Harry to deprive him of a shield. Payne ducks through a door and an explosion follows almost immediately, leading them to believe he killed himself.

Later, Jack stops at a coffee shop, and speaks to a friend of his, a bus driver, who proceeds to walk off to his bus and begin his route. As Jack waves goodbye, the bus rolls on, then explodes. As Jack looks on in stunned horror, unable to save his friend, a nearby pay phone rings. Jack answers the phone. A very-much-alive Payne has phoned Jack, telling him that another bus has also been rigged with explosives. When it exceeds 50 miles per hour (mph), the bomb is armed and set to explode if the speed drops below 50 mph thereafter. Additionally, no one is allowed on or off the bus.

Traven races to intercept the bus, commandeering a sports car to do so. He locates the bus on a freeway, but he is too late to stop the bomb from arming. Now forced to keep bus moving at all costs, Traven jumps from the car to the fast-moving bus. A passenger, mistakenly believing that Jack is there to arrest him, produces a handgun and demands the bus be stopped. While Jack tries to explain the situation, another rider tackles the hoodlum, causing the gun to go off and hit the bus driver.

A young woman, Annie (Bullock), takes the wheel. Even though she lost her license for speeding, she must, ironically, speed through the congested city. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, the speeding bus strikes a baby carriage - which turns out to be full of aluminum cans instead of a child. The police are alerted to the crisis and provide an escort, clearing traffic and eventually directing the bus to an unfinished section of freeway clear of traffic.

The police commandeer a large flatbed truck to try to unload the passengers. Jack warns his superior that the attempt would be seen by the bomber (since television news helicopters are filming overhead) and the passengers killed. However, the young cop convinces Payne to allow the bus driver off the bus. Seeing the injured man taken off safely, a woman attempts to get off too. Payne, who is indeed watching, detonates a small charge below the floor of the bus near the door; the passenger falls through the floor, and is run over and killed.

The situation takes a terrifying aspect when the police learn of a wide gap at an approaching overpass. With no other option, Traven tells Annie to speed up in hopes of jumping the gap. Against all probability (and the laws of physics), the bus successfully makes it while still maintaining the necessary speed.

Following Jack's instructions, Annie drives into Los Angeles International Airport, whose airspace is prohibited to the media helicopters. Once there, Traven persuades Jack to allow him to disembark to negotiate the ransom and then attempts to disarm the bomb by riding a service cart, towed by a preceding truck, under the carriage of the bus. Unfortunately, the tow line breaks and the bus passengers are forced to rescue Traven by hauling him back into the vehicle. Meanwhile, Harry finds the bomber's identity. It turns out that he is Howard Payne, a retired Atlanta police bomb squad officer, invalided out when he lost a thumb on duty, who is living in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Payne is prepared, and as they go to arrest him, the house explodes, thus killing Harry and the rest of the officers.

Jack thinking Harry is going to call him and tell him that they have caught Payne instead gets a call from Payne himself and informs him that Harry is dead and he knew that the bomb's timer (a gold watch) would lead the police to his identity. After the call Jack goes into a fit of rage smashing the phone and trying to also calm himself. Jack then sees Annie's sweater and notices that its from the University of Arizona. Through that he realises that Payne kept referring to Annie as a wildcat because of the football team. Realizing that Payne must have a camera watching the interior of the bus and manages to have several minutes of the transmission taped and fed back into the camera in an endless loop. This allows the passengers to get off without being detected. The driverless bus then collides with a cargo plane and explodes. While his supervisor is going to call off the payment to Payne, Jack convinces him to go through with it because Payne would not know that the bus exploded.

Whilst the police set up a sting operation to try to capture Payne, they keep a watchful eye but with no sight of him. Payne thinking they have made the drop is getting ready to pick up the money only to catch on the video of the security monitor that was on the bus an irregularity. One of the passenger's handbags disappears then reappears between the loop tipping Payne off that the hostages must have got off the bus. In a last ditch attempt to get his money, Payne masquerades as a policeman, lures Annie onto a Metro Red Line subway train and takes her hostage. Realizing Payne's plan, Jack boards the train. The two fight on top of a subway car and Payne is decapitated by a hanging light. However, the train can't stop since Payne killed the operator and destroyed the controls. In the end, it crashes at what is now the Hollywood/Highland Red Line station. (In 1993, the North Hollywood extension was under construction.) The train derails and is sent up an equipment access ramp on Hollywood Blvd. outside Grauman's Chinese Theater.

As they emerge unhurt from the wreckage, Jack asks Annie jokingly "I thought relationships based on extreme experiences never worked?" and after she replies, they kiss.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Notes

One of the most famous scenes in the film shows the bus jumping across a gap in an elevated freeway-to-freeway ramp while still under construction. Both sides of the gap are at identical heights, making it impossible that the jump would work in real life. According to the "Making of..." feature that accompanied the DVD release, the stunt used a ramp and really did traverse fifty feet in the air. To handle the sudden jolt on landing, the stunt bus had no passengers aboard and the driver was wearing a shock-absorbing harness. The gap in the highway was added through CGI; note the flock of digital seagulls added by the FX tech to enhance the verisimilitude of the scene. You may also note if you look closely, when the bus is flying over the bridge that is under construction the gap between the two bridges was edited in. If you look below the bridge closely you can still see the shadow of the completed bridge.

The jump, as well as most freeway scenes in the movie, was filmed on California's Interstate 105, which had not been officially opened at the time of filming. Filming of the final scenes occurred at Mojave Spaceport, which doubled for Los Angeles International Airport. Those familiar with the local geography could easily identify the stand-in by mountains visible in the background.

There is a sequel called Speed 2: Cruise Control set on a cruise ship. Only Sandra Bullock returned to reprise her role. Willem Dafoe played the villain, and the new protagonist/love interest was played by Jason Patric. It was a critical and commercial flop.

The basic plot premise of extortion using a bomb designed to trigger automatically if a vehicle tries to stop was not original to this movie. Some earlier iterations are:

"Trapped in the Sky," the first episode of the Thunderbirds animated television series (1965), features a supersonic airliner with a bomb in its landing gear. The occupants are threatened by radiation poisoning from the craft's power source overwhelming its ablative shielding which forces International Rescue to intervene to save them.
In Rod Serling's 1966 TV-movie The Doomsday Flight, Edmond O'Brien's bomb is triggered to detonate if the airliner descends below 5,000 feet (1500 m).
In the 1975 Japanese movie Crisis Express 109 (Shinkansen Daibakuha) (shown in English as The Bullet Train), a Shinkansen train will be destroyed if its speed drops below 80 km/h.

The difference offered by Speed is really one of amplification: additional plot elements are layered onto the basic premise. With this film, the bus runs the immediate risk of collision in a congested traffic area that would, of course, have stopped and/or slowed it down enough to trigger the bomb. So, before the bomb can be addressed, the bus must be desperately maneuvered through the city, unable to slow down.

[edit] Parodies

The Speed movies have been parodied numerous times. For example, an episode of the UK/Irish situation comedy Father Ted, titled "Speed 3," shows Father Dougal McGuire trapped on a milk float with a bomb set to detonate if the float goes slower than 4 miles per hour (6.4 km/h). A further ironic use of the Speed theme came in the Academy Award-nominated short film, Speed for Thespians, in which a group of actors attempts to play out Chekhov's play "The Bear" on a New York City bus. Another parody can be seen in the Leslie Nielsen movie Spy Hard, featuring the late blind musician Ray Charles as the bus driver.

The plot element featuring a looped video recording was also spoofed in an episode of the US animated comedy program The Simpsons titled "The Springfield Files". In this episode, Homer Simpson remembers getting the idea from the film, which he wrongly thought was called "The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down". (This despite mentioning the word 'speed' several times in his description.) In another episode of The Simpsons, "Bye Bye Nerdie", Marge engages Otto in a bus/car chase, which causes the character Millhouse Van Houten to remark, "its like Speed 2 only with a bus instead of a boat." In the episode "Simpsonscalifragilisticexpiala-d'oh-cious" Bart says the lines "Pop quiz, hotshot..." and "What do you do, what DO you do?".

It is also parodied in the animé Cyborg Kuro-chan where the bus was driven by Kuro-chan and was hijacked.

Issue #332 of popular satire magazine MAD featured a parody entitled "Not Quite Up To Speed". A 1994 issue of Cracked Magazine also featured their parody entitled "Peed".

During the first Liberty City level in Grand Theft Auto, one of the hidden missions involves a bus that explodes if it does not stay above a specific speed. There is another Speed-style mission in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where the player has to keep a limousine above a certain speed while its passengers try to defuse a bomb that will detonate if the car slows down.

In the 1997 flight simulator Flight Unlimited II for PC, one mission involves flying a consignment of gold bullion for the US Treasury. Soon after the mission starts a voice comes over the radio saying "Pop-quiz, hotshot!" and proceeds to give instructions that the plane reach San Francisco International by a certain time, and that the bullion be dropped out at a point along the way. The aeroplane must stay above a certain speed and below a certain height (difficult due to mountainous terrain). If any rules are broken the plane is "Blown out of the sky!".

In the TV Series South Park, episode entitled 4th Grade, Timmy is trapped in his wheelchair that is out of control due to a delay in time-travelling, accompanied by a whining, squealing woman obviously a parody of Sandra Bullock. The South Park Police decide to deploy Kenny McCormick by riding a small cart, towed by a preceding vehicle, that slips between the wheels of the bus. Unfortunately, he misses Timmy by a few inches. The cart, which Kenny was riding gets flipped upside-down because of an open sewer. Kenny ends up being dragged to death along the highway.

In the Family Guy episode "Lethal Weapons" Peter is watching a sequel to Speed entitled "Speed 3: Glacier of Doom". Two unnamed characters (both resembling the people from Speed) are shown standing in front of an iceberg in an Arctic setting. The woman says "If this glacier goes any slower than one mile a year we're screwed!" She then proceeds to turn around and tell the Eskimo, who's sitting by a frozen pond fishing, to "Get out of the Way!" The Eskimo turns around, and then turns back to what he was doing.

During a level in the video game Viewtiful Joe, a player must successfully jump a bus over a large gap, using one of the main character's special moves.

In Hey Arnold!: The Movie, there is a scene in the where a bus driver passes out at the wheel with his metal leg on the acceleration, and Arnold, Helga, and Gerald must take control of the bus. They manage to drive the bus safely through the city until it crashes into a rail and flips on its side, similar to the final scene in the film.

A TV advertisement for the Australian snack dessert YoGo was based completely on Speed. YoGorilla is forced to drive the bus safely through the city while his buddy Snake eats and advertises YoGo. The advertisement ends in the famous gap-jumping scene.

The stop motion animation series Robot Chicken featured a clip with Keanu Reeves briefly reenacting his characters on a set, and beating representations of the films' antagonists; Neo from The Matrix, Constantine (film of the same name), and "the guy from Speed," stopping "famous character actor Dennis Hopper" who's taped straps of TNT across his sweater and attempts lighting it, only to be kicked down by Keanu.

Donkey Kong Country had an episode in its first season that used the film's plot and title. The episode revolves around Krusha, having gotten a boost of brainpower from Klump accidentally running over him, scheming to distact Donkey Kong into going on a ride with the Robot Candy Clone in a mine cart rigged with a bomb set to go off the moment it stops. Over the course of the episode, though, Diddy and Dixie, and later King K. Rool wind up in the cart themselves instead of DK. In the end, the bomb is a dud.

In the television show Muppets Tonight, guest star Sandra Bullock pretends to be a terrorist, and threatens to blow up the studio if the ratings fall below "50."

In the Video Game Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, there is a mission in Free Ride Extreme that has a mission that in order to get 1 of the special cars, you must drive the truck across town, without going slower than 30 mph.