Speed (film)

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Speed
Theatrical poster
Directed by	Jan de Bont
Produced by	Mark Gordon Ian Bryce
Written by	Graham Yost Joss Whedon (uncredited)
Starring	Keanu Reeves Dennis Hopper Sandra Bullock Joe Morton Jeff Daniels Alan Ruck Glenn Plummer
Music by	Mark Mancina
Cinematography	Andrzej Bartkowiak
Editing by	John Wright
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	June 10, 1994
Running time	116 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$28,000,000
Gross revenue	$350,448,145
Followed by	Speed 2: Cruise Control

Speed is a 1994 American action/thriller film directed by Jan de Bont, and set in Los Angeles. It focuses on an LAPD officer, Police Officer III Jack Traven, who tries to arrest an insane bomber/extortionist. After the bomber escapes, he sets up a bomb on a city bus which Traven boards and must keep moving above 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) or the bomb will explode. The film stars Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Sandra Bullock, Joe Morton and Jeff Daniels.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Cast 3 Production 4 The Official Soundtrack 5 Reaction 5.1 Awards 6 Popular Culture 7 Sequel 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Plot

Police Officer III Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) and his partner Police Officer III Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels), a veteran with over 10 years on the force, are explosives experts in LAPD SWAT. A disgruntled Atlanta Bomb Squad retiree, Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper), is holding a group of thirteen office workers trapped in an elevator for ransom. Jack and Harry manage to rescue the hostages before Payne sends the elevator plummeting to the basement. They find Payne in a freight elevator. After a brief standoff, with Payne holding Harry hostage, Payne escapes and sets off a small explosion that knocks Jack unconscious and appears to kill Payne. Jack and Harry are then commended for their bravery by the LAPD in an official ceremony.

The next morning, as Jack heads to work, a city bus explodes in front of him, killing the driver. Payne calls Jack on a nearby pay phone, revealing he is alive, his disgust with Jack for ruining his elevator hostage scheme, and that he has rigged another bus to explode. The bomb will arm itself when the bus reaches 50 mph and will detonate if the bus goes below that speed. In addition, Payne will detonate the bus manually if anyone gets off the bus, or if the ransom is not delivered on time. Jack locates the bus and jumps aboard, but the bomb has already been armed.

When Jack identifies himself as a police officer in an attempt to calm the passengers, one man draws a gun, believing Jack has come to arrest him. He accidentally shoots the driver, Sam (Hawthorne James), as he struggles to escape. Another passenger, Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock), takes the wheel. Annie is left to drive the bus throughout the city while keeping it above the necessary speed and avoiding other cars. Jack is in contact with the officer in charge of his SWAT section, Lieutenant II "Mac" McMahon (Joe Morton), who arranges an escort and directs them around the city from the air to try to get them away from traffic. News of the bomb on the bus quickly makes the TV broadcasts and soon there is a long line of police cars and news choppers trailing the bus, which has been routed onto the then-unopened Interstate 105 freeway. Jack negotiates for the wounded bus driver to be evacuated from the moving bus. However, when Payne witnesses a passenger named Helen trying to get off as well, he detonates a small bomb under the steps. This causes Helen to fall under the bus, where she is crushed beneath the wheels.

The bus comes to a 50 ft (15 m) gap in the elevated highway, but by increasing speed the bus launches over the gap. After they drive to the Los Angeles International Airport where they can safely maintain their speed by driving in circles on an airfield. Jack goes under the bus on a sled to try and defuse the bomb, but when the sled loses control he tries to grab hold of the bus and accidentally ruptures the fuel tank. Meanwhile, Harry leads a raid at Payne's residence. However, Payne is not at home, and his residence is rigged with a bomb that blows up the house with the team inside.

Jack then discovers that Payne is monitoring the bus with a hidden camera. Using a news van, Jack is able to find the video feed and record it. The news team loops the footage being transmitted to Payne while the passengers are safely evacuated. Jack rigs the bus to keep going in circles so he and Annie can get off by riding on the bus' floor panel. The bus crashes into a fully fueled cargo plane and is destroyed in a spectacular explosion, with the exception of the edited version (shown on airplanes), where the bus is destroyed by crashing into a loaded refueling truck instead. Jack begins to fall in love with Annie, but she warns him that relationships started in intense situations tend not to last. Meanwhile, Payne is about to detonate the bomb when he notices that the feed is being looped and realizes that everyone has gotten off the bus safely.

The police plan to catch Payne picking up the ransom money, believing that he is unaware of the evacuation and destruction of the bus. However, Payne is far ahead of them. Disguised as a police officer, he kidnaps Annie off of the street, then escapes into the subway where he collects the ransom money that dropped through a cleverly concealed hole beneath the designated trash can. He boards a train, kills the operator, and wires Annie with a bomb. Jack pursues them and follows Payne onto the top of the subway car, where a fight ensues. The duel ends when Jack pushes Payne's head into a tunnel light, decapitating him. Jack disarms Annie's bomb but cannot stop the train, which was damaged during the fight. Noticing a sharp curve in the track ahead, Jack, in a counter-intuitive move, decides to accelerate the train to intentionally derail it, rather than have the train crash into the barrier at the end of the line. Despite Annie's pleas for him to get out and save himself, Jack refuses, and stands by her, something that visibly touches Annie. The train successfully derails breaking through a wall where it comes to rest on Hollywood Boulevard. Jack and Annie begin a relationship despite that it began under intense circumstances and kiss as shocked civilians watch.

[edit] Cast

• Keanu Reeves as Police Officer III Jack Traven
• Dennis Hopper as Howard Payne
• Sandra Bullock as Annie Porter
• Jeff Daniels as Police Officer III / Detective II Harry Temple
• Joe Morton as Lieutenant II "Mac" McMahon
• Richard Lineback as Sergeant II Norwood
• Alan Ruck as Doug Stephens
• Margaret Medina as Police Officer III Robin
• Glenn Plummer as Jaguar Owner (later known as "Maurice" in the sequel)
• Hawthorne James as Sam
• Beth Grant as Helen

[edit] Production

The first choice for the role of Jack Traven was Stephen Baldwin. Baldwin read the script and felt the character for Jack Traven as written in the earlier script was too much like the John McClane character from Die Hard. Director Jan de Bont then cast Keanu Reeves as Jack Traven after seeing him in Point Break. He felt that the actor was "vulnerable on the screen. He's not threatening to men because he's not that bulky, and he looks great to women".^[1] Reeves did not like how the character of Jack Traven came across in Graham Yost's original screenplay. He felt that there were "situations set up for one-liners and I felt it was forced — Die Hard mixed with some kind of screwball comedy".^[1] Jan de Bont brought in Joss Whedon a week before principal photography started to work on the script.^[2] With Reeves' input, Whedon changed Traven from being "a maverick hotshot" to "the polite guy trying not to get anybody killed",^[2] and removed the character's glib dialogue and made him more earnest.^[1] Reeves had dealt with the LAPD before on Point Break, and learned about their concern for human life, which he incorporated into Traven.^[1] One of Whedon's significant contributions was changing the character of Doug Stephens (Alan Ruck) from a lawyer, "a bad guy and he died", according to the writer, to a tourist, "just a nice, totally out-of-his-depth guy".^[2] Whedon worked predominantly on the dialogue, but also created a few significant plot points, like the killing of Harry Temple.^[2]

Sandra Bullock came to read for Speed with Reeves to make sure there was the right chemistry between the two actors. She recalls that they had to do "all these really physical scenes together, rolling around on the floor and stuff".^[3] While Speed was in production, actor and close friend to Reeves, River Phoenix died.^[1] Immediately after Phoenix died, de Bont changed the shooting schedule to work around Reeves and give him scenes that were easier to do. "It got to him emotionally. He became very quiet, and it took him quite a while to work it out by himself and calm down. It scared the hell out of him", de Bont recalls.^[1] The director did not want Traven to have long hair and wanted the character "to look strong and in control of himself".^[1] To that end, Reeves shaved his head almost completely. The director remembers, "everyone at the studio was scared shitless when they first saw it. There was only like a millimeter. What you see in the movie is actually grown in".^[1] Reeves also spent two months at Gold's Gym in Los Angeles to get in shape for the role. Initially, the actor was nervous about the film's many action sequences but as the shooting progressed he became more involved. He wanted to do the stunt where Traven jumps from a Jaguar onto the bus himself. Jan de Bont did not want him to do it, but Reeves rehearsed it in secret. On the day of the sequence, the actor did the stunt himself and de Bont remembers, "I almost had a heart attack".^[1]

Many of the freeway scenes in the movie were filmed on California s Interstate 105 and Interstate 110, which was not officially open at the time of filming. The jump was filmed on the fifth-level HOV lane ramp of the massive stack interchange. Filming of the final scenes occurred at Mojave Spaceport, which doubled for Los Angeles International Airport. The shots of the LACMTA Metro Red Line through the construction zone were shot using an 1/8th scale model of the Metro Red Line, except for the jump when it derailed.^[4]

Eleven GM New Look buses and one Flxible Metro bus were used in the filming of the movie. Two of them were blown up, one was used for the high-speed scenes, one had the front cut off for inside shots, and one was used solely for the "under bus" shots. Another bus was used for the bus jump scene, which was done in one take.^[4]

The cargo airplane destroyed in the airport scene carries the marking of a fictional delivery company called Pacific Courier, implying that the film is set in the same universe as Die Hard. In fact, Jan de Bont was the cinematographer of Die Hard. Furthermore, de Bont initially offered John McTiernan the chance to direct the film, but he declined.

In the scene where the bus must jump across a gap in an uncompleted elevated freeway-to-freeway ramp while still under construction, a ramp was used to give the bus the necessary lift off so that it could jump the full fifty feet. The bus used in the jump was empty except for the driver, who wore a shock-absorbing harness that suspended him mid-air above the seat, so he could handle the jolt on landing, and avoid spinal injury (as was the case for many stuntmen in previous years that were handling similar stunts). The highway section the bus jumped over was a regular highway, with the gap added in the editing process using CGI.^[4] In a commentary track on the region 1 DVD director Jan de Bont reports that the bus jump stunt did not go as planned. To do the jump the bus had everything possible removed to make it lighter. On the first try the stunt driver missed the ramp and crashed the bus making it unusable. This failure was not reported to the studio at the time. A second bus was prepared and two days later a second attempt was successful. But, again, things did not go as intended. Advised that the bus would only go about 20 feet, the director placed one of his multiple cameras in a position that was supposed to capture the bus landing. However, the bus traveled much farther airborne than anyone had thought possible. It crashed down on top of the camera and destroyed it. Luckily, another camera placed about 90 feet from the jump ramp recorded the event.

[edit] The Official Soundtrack

A soundtrack album featuring "songs from and inspired by" the film was released with the following tracks:

Speed: Songs From And Inspired By The Motion Picture

1. Billy Idol - "Speed"
2. The Plimsouls - "A Million Miles Away"
3. Gin Blossoms - "Soul Deep"
4. Cracker - "Let's Go for a Drive"
5. Blues Traveler - "Go Outside and Drive"
6. Ric Ocasek - "Crash"
7. Pat Benatar - "Rescue Me"
8. Rod Stewart - "Hard Road"
9. Carnival Strippers - "Cot"
10. Gary Numan - "Cars ('93 Sprint Remix)"
11. Saint Etienne - "Like a Motorway"
12. Kiss - "Mr. Speed"

In addition to the above release, a separate album featuring 40 minutes of Mark Mancina's score from the film was released.

Speed: Original Motion Picture Score

1. Main Title
2. Rescue
3. Entering Airport
4. Rush Hour
5. Helen Dies
6. The Gap
7. Choppers
8. Pershing Square
9. Elevator Peril
10. Fight on Train
11. Dangling Feet
12. City Streets
13. Wildcat
14. The Dolly
15. Move
16. Pop Quiz
17. Freight Elevator
18. Elevator Stall
19. End Title

[edit] Reaction

Speed was released on June 10, 1994 in 2,138 theaters and debuted at #1, grossing $14.5 million on its opening weekend. It went on to gross $121.3 million domestically and $229.2 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $350.5 million.^[5]

Speed was a critical and a commercial success. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 90% of critics gave the film positive reviews. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, "Films like Speed belong to the genre I call Bruised Forearm Movies, because you're always grabbing the arm of the person sitting next to you. Done wrong, they seem like tired replays of old chase cliches. Done well, they're fun. Done as well as Speed, they generate a kind of manic exhilaration".^[6] In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote, "Action flicks are usually written off as a debased genre, unless, of course, they work. And Speed works like a charm. It's a reminder of how much movie escapism can still stir us when it's dished out with this kind of dazzle".^[7] Hal Hinson, in his review for the Washington Post, praised Sandra Bullock's performance: "The only performer to stand out is Sandra Bullock as Annie ... If it weren't for the smart-funny twist she gives to her lines -- they're the best in the film -- the air on that bus would have been stifling ... she emerges as a slightly softer version of the Linda Hamilton-Sigourney Weaver heroines: capable, independent, but still irresistibly vulnerable".^[8] In her review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Mr. Hopper finds nice new ways to convey crazy menace with each new role. Certainly he's the most colorful figure in a film that wastes no time on character development or personality".^[9] Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "It's a pleasure to be in the hands of an action filmmaker who respects the audience. De Bont's craftsmanship is so supple that even the triple ending feels justified, like the cataclysmic final stage of a Sega death match".^[10] Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "The movie has two virtues essential to good pop thrillers. First, it plugs uncomplicatedly into lurking anxieties -- in this case the ones we brush aside when we daily surrender ourselves to mass transit in a world where the loonies are everywhere".^[11]

Entertainment Weekly magazine's Owen Gleiberman ranked Speed as the eighth best film of 1994.^[12] The magazine also ranked the film eighth on their "The Best Rock-'em, Sock-'em Movies of the Past 25 Years" list.^[13] Speed also ranks 451st on Empire magazine's 2008 list of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time".^[14]

[edit] Awards

In 1995, it won two Academy Awards for Best Sound and Best Sound Effects Editing. The film was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.^[15]

[edit] Popular Culture

• Homer Simpson references the film in an episode of The Simpsons, calling it "The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down". He sets up a scheme that will allow him to leave work early by looping old security camera footage.
• Frank Costanza refers to the film as "The Bus" in an episode of Seinfeld.
• Mythbusters busted a myth concerning a scene where Traven has people moving over to one side of a bus to balance a sharp turn. It was found that the bus could make the turn without the weight redistribution.
• In the television show NCIS, Agent DiNozzo uses the same footage looping tactic to fool the terrorists while a SWAT team evacuates a classroom. Later, the rest of the NCIS team insinuates that he got this inspiration from a movie with Sandra Bullock in it.
• In the computer game Grand Theft Auto, there is a mission where the player's character must board a bus and drive it at high speed along a stretch of road without being blocked by traffic or forced to slow down. Failure results in the bus exploding.
• In an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Master Shake reveals a movie script he has been writing entitled "Faaaasst", just like "Speed" only the bus must travel at 155 miles per hour. He states "my movie is just like the movie "Speed", only this time, the speed is FASTER".
• In the episode "Speed 3" of the British TV sitcom Father Ted, when Dougal takes over a milk route after he and Ted expose the philandering milkman, the disgruntled former "Mr.Universe" takes revenge by planting a bomb on the milk float that will activate if it reaches 4mph, and will go off if the speed falls, killing Dougal.
• In an episode of Will & Grace when Karen is asked why she's afraid of lifts she claims it's because she and a bunch of other office workers were once stuck in one by Dennis Hopper who told them he would blow them up unless they met his needs. They were all then apparently saved by Keanu Reeves who stops the bomb. Jack then explains that this wasn't Karen's life it was infact the opening scene to "speed" in which she retaliates by explaining how the film was misleading, she expected to see a film about drugs and then suddenly they're all on a bus.

[edit] Sequel

In 1997, a sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control, was released. Set on a cruise ship, it features Sandra Bullock returning to reprise her role, Willem Dafoe as the new villain, and Jason Patric as the new protagonist and love interest.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Speed at the Internet Movie Database
• Speed at Allmovie
• Speed at Rotten Tomatoes
• Speed at Box Office Mojo

Preceded by The Flintstones

Box office number-one films of 1994 (USA) June 12, 1994

Succeeded by Wolf

Preceded by Weekend at Bernie's II

Box office number-one films of 1994 (UK) October 2, 1994

Succeeded by The Lion King

v • d • e Films directed by Jan de Bont Speed (1994) · Twister (1996) · Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) · The Haunting (1999) · Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003)