Cruise to nowhere

Speed 2 is dead in the water

by Peter Keough

Directed by Jan de Bont. Written by Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson. With Sandra Bullock, Jason Patric, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison, Brian McCardie, Christine Firkins, and Michael G. Hagerty. A Twentieth Century Fox release. At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, Lincoln Mall, Narragansett, Showcase, Tri-Boro, Westerly, and Woonsocket cinemas.

It's still spring, but the films of this benighted summer can't get any worse than Speed 2, which demonstrates with shameless cynicism Hollywood's contempt for its audience. Although overrated, the original had a certain conceptual elegance, a mechanical logic reminiscent of Buster Keaton's The General. The sequel retains only the title, a bored director, and a boring actress. Devoid even of the minimal pleasures one expects from a cheesy spectacle of this kind, Jan de Bont's Speed 2 is filmmaking that doesn't even achieve cruise control. It's a franchise dead in the water, and, at over two hours, it takes a torturously long time to sink.

Not that it doesn't labor to attain velocity. The first chase takes place during the opening credits. Alex (Jason Patric, a fine actor but a phlegmatic and sullen action hero), is a Los Angeles SWAT team cop pursuing a van on his motorcycle. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Annie (Sandra Bullock, whose acting technique consists of stuttering and jumping around a lot), besieges her driving instructor (Tim Conway, making one yearn for the relative artistry of McHale's Navy) with tales of her failed relationship with Jack, the Keanu Reeves character from the original film, as she terrorizes traffic for would-be comic relief. "Relationships based on extreme circumstances never work out," she says in the film's one stab at a catch phrase.

She thinks her new beau is a stable, unheroic cop who works the day shift at Venice Beach. When Alex's high-speed pursuit (typical of the non-thrills in this movie, its high point occurs when some boxes of computer equipment fall out of the back of the van) collides with Annie's driving lesson, she is shocked to discover her boyfriend is just another reckless, day-saving superhero. "We don't know each other," she says in the film's facile attempt at characterization. To make it up to her, Alex invites her to a weeklong Caribbean cruise on a luxury liner.

It would take great ingenuity and imagination to turn a cruise ship into an exciting setting for an action movie -- these are, after all, the vessels for which shuffleboard was invented. De Bont compounds the inertness of his setting by adding an equally undynamic element: computers. Having learned nothing from Bullock's previous failure The Net, he makes his villain Geiger (Willem Dafoe, who can't conceal his lack of interest in the role, though he repeatedly bares every tooth in his head) a genius of the keyboard who was fired from his job designing software for cruise ships after he contracted a work-induced illness. Although his motive is a naked ripoff of Dennis Hopper's in the first film, Dafoe's Geiger never approaches his predecessor's exuberant malice. But that's understandable, since most of his scenes are close-ups of his hands tapping commands into a computer.

Geiger commandeers the ship's mainframe, lays a few stink bombs to befuddle the passengers and crew, and sets the liner on a collision course with an oil tanker so he can escape with the millions of dollars of jewels in the vault. But he doesn't count on the torpid Patric or the whiny and irritating Bullock, whose clueless efforts prolong this slender story inexcusably. There is no wit or suspense in the alleged action that follows, which consists mostly of people running down corridors saying "Oh shit!" or staring with jaws dropped at some new danger that proves, when revealed to the audience, utterly dull and predictable.

If the action is unengaging, what passes for character and dialogue is positively insulting. Borrowing from The Poseidon Adventure (which, along with Steven Seagal's Under Siege, seems a masterpiece by comparison), de Bont tries to add human interest with a passenger list of stereotypes. They are mostly overweight and unattractive people spoiled by luxury, with the exception of Dante (Bo Svenson), a hustler with an unexplained camera fetish, and Drew (Christine Firkins), a 14-year-old who is not only endangered but also deaf and smarmily nubile (a snippet of Stanley Kubrick's Lolita on video makes the point none too subtly).

The long-awaited special-effects climax is the nautical equivalent of the conclusion of Con Air, which makes one wonder if there is some cultural significance to the recurrent image of large vehicles slamming into resort towns. The real significance of Speed 2, however, is all too obvious: this summer will be a long spell in the cinematic doldrums.