by Lindy West
Keanu figures out which bus it is and starts chasing the bus. He has to stop it before it goes over fifty miles per hour! There is a joke about LA traffic that I could make here but I will not!
When the bus passengers notice Keanu chasing them, they say things like, “He really wants to get on this bus!” and “That man sure has a hard-on for this bus.” They don’t understand that he just has a hard-on for saving their dang lives! Also porno.
Keanu spies a random cool guy driving a speedy convertible with a vanity plate that says “TUNEMAN,” and decides it’s just what he needs for chasing down this bus. Keanu steals TUNEMAN’s convertible, and in the process he also steals TUNEMAN! TUNEMAN is more exasperated than terrified, even though he is nearly liquefied many times by Keanu’s gonzo driving styles. That’s probably because this whole carjacking thing is making TUNEMAN late to either creating or listening to TUNES (it’s never specified). “I gotta get on that bus,” Keanu explains. “Yeah, yeah, you get on that bus.”—TUNEMAN, over it.
TUNEMAN has a car phone, so Keanu is able to alert the cops about the return of Dennis and his pointlessly baroque speed-based bus bomb. He has TUNEMAN take the wheel, and then he leaps on to the bus! Then TUNEMAN crashes, but that’s not Keanu’s problem.
The bus passengers are reasonably freaked, so Keanu explains that he’s a cop. A small-time criminal, assuming Keanu is there to arrest him, pulls out a gun! Coincidentally, then Keanu tells him exactly the thing I say to myself every night before bed: “I don’t care about your crime. Whatever you did, I’m sure you’re sorry. So it’s cool now. It’s over. I’m not a cop right now. We’re just two cool guys.”
Just when the situation is almost deescalated, some construction man gotta be a hero and tackles the guy with the gun, accidentally shooting Sam the bus driver. Great. This is not what Keanu needs right now!
Keanu tells Sandra Bullock to take the wheel so he can try to find the bomb, and then they have this exchange, which is really all you want from a movie:
Sandy: I should probably tell you that I’m riding this bus because I had my driver’s license revoked.
Keanu: What for?
Sandy: Speeding.
Sandra Bullock is an unmatched charm powerhouse, and I feel like nobody acknowledges that anymore because she made too many comedies for women, and men can’t stand that. Watch Sandra Bullock in action. Watch Sandra Bullock in Speed and then tell me you don’t want to frame your spouse for a crime so you can marry her instead! Watch While You Were Sleeping and try not to send Sandra Bullock a thank-you card with $4,000 inside. I DARE YOU.
Keanu inspects the bomb and calls Jeff, who’s back at the office trying to dig up dirt on Dennis. Keanu tells Jeff that “there’s enough C-4 on this thing to put a hole in the world,” and also mentions that the timer on the bomb is a cheap gold watch—the kind of shitty watch the bomb cops get when they retire! (Can you imagine being this pissed about getting a comfortable retirement, a lifetime of unconditional hero worship, and a present??)
There’s heavy traffic ahead, so they have to exit the freeway to stay above fifty, and here begins one of the great mysteries of the movie Speed: WHY DOES SANDRA BULLOCK HAVE TO DRIVE THE BUS? Keanu—a highly trained police officer dispatched to handle this extremely dangerous situation—just kind of hovers over Sandy B.’s shoulder, occasionally gabbing to Jeff or Dennis on the phone, while she—A RANDOM CIVILIAN—navigates crowded Los Angeles surface streets in a bus going fifty miles per hour. What if she runs someone over? What if she is bad at driving? Who is accountable for all of the human lives on the bus when they are put into the hands of a person who doesn’t even have a driver’s license?
Sometimes Keanu and Sandy take a little time to flirt as Sam bleeds out behind them and they hurtle toward death.
Sandy has to make a hairpin turn at top speed in order to get back on the freeway. (See, not to be one of those analog bitches, but this is all I need from an action movie. Just an exciting bus turn! I do not require Transformers!)
Dennis told Keanu that nobody is allowed to get off the bus, and he’ll know if they do because he is monitoring them via secret video. Keanu convinces Dennis to let Bus Driver Sam get off so he doesn’t die, because I guess mayors never give $3.7 million to terrorists who let one bus driver die, but they do sometimes give $3.7 million to terrorists who didn’t. He gets the big beefy construction worker to help him move Sam by saying, “You! Gigantor!” (Hey, how about sir when you want someone to do you a favor?) The cops pull up alongside the door of the bus on a trailer and Keanu and Gigantor, I mean sir, pass Sam over to them in a way that definitely seems like everyone would die.
Even though Keanu just explained that only Bus Driver Sam is allowed to get off the bus, the temptation is too great for another passenger, Helen (the great Beth Grant), and she tries to jump off after him. Dennis was ready for this, and he activates the Helen Contingency, a smaller Helen-shaped bomb right under the door of the bus, which he put there in case any Helens try to escape. Helen blows up and gets run over and is dead. Now it’s not so fun being on the Speed bus anymore! Adventure? More like I’m-sadventure!
Oops, turns out the freeway isn’t finished. (Nobody knew that???) There’s a fifty-foot gap coming up in three miles. Keanu thinks about it and decides that they’ll have to fly the bus over the gap. It’s the only way. Really, you can’t exit and go around it? There’s not an exit for the next three miles? In Los Angeles? OKAY!
Keanu tells Sandy to floor it (again, why isn’t he just driving?! Abolish the LAPD!), and they accelerate toward the gap and fly over it effortlessly, you know, like a real bus would. It definitely wouldn’t 100 percent absolutely tip straight down into the pit and accordion into a bloody, clattering disc!
Hey, if you guys had a flying bus this whole time, why didn’t you get off the fucking freeway instead of causing four hundred car accidents?
Keanu directs Sandy (STILL DRIVING) to LAX so the bus can circle around and around on the tarmac without endangering other drivers, and so that the news choppers will stop broadcasting their every move straight to Dennis’s TV. Now it’s time to defuse the bomb.
Keanu slides underneath the moving bus on a little skateboard attached to a rope. He scoots down to where the bomb is and tries to dismantle it while Jeff gives him instructions over the phone. It makes total sense that Keanu has to personally do this. Did you know there’s only one guy in the LAPD?
Keanu can’t figure out the bomb and then starts careening out of control underneath the bus. In order to not die, he has to stab the fuel tank with a screwdriver and cling to the bottom of the bus like a lil spider, until Sir Gigantor opens a hatch and pulls him up into the bus. Wow, this is a beautiful movie about teamwork in adversity! If I’m making Dennis Hopper an allegory for mediocre white male greed, then truly the bus is an allegory for human tenderness and teamwork during COVID-19! I feel strengthened by this.
Meanwhile, Jeff Daniels locates Dennis Hopper’s house, but unfortunately, the house is a bomb! Jeff goes there and explodes.
Which, like, I hate because I love Jeff. But also, you guys didn’t suspect anything? You didn’t suspect any funny business from the evil bomb mastermind?
When he hears that Jeff is dead, Keanu freaking LOSES IT, and only Sandy B. can bring him back to earth: “I can’t do this by myself!”
YEAH, SHE REALLY CAN’T.
NOR SHOULD SHE BE EXPECTED TO.
Dennis tells the cops they need to drop his money in a garbage can at Pershing Square. The bus is losing fuel and also has a flat tire. They need to get these people off the bus fast. Keanu finally figures out how Dennis knows everything about what they’re doing: he’s hooked into the surveillance camera from the bus! The cops make one of the nearby news vans record thirty seconds of everyone sitting still on the bus and loop it. With Dennis now in the dark, they finally get all the people off the bus except for Keanu and Sandy.
Again, SHE SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN OFF THE BUS AS WELL! SHE IS A CIVIL
IAN BUS PASSENGER! HE CAN DRIVE! WHAT THE FUCK!
Then the two of them escape by using the hatch in the bottom of the bus as a sort of surfboard and sliding into some cones, while the bus drives into a cargo plane and explodes. Sorry, you didn’t clear the airport? At any point in this whole thing?
They lie on the ground for a moment in a sensual embrace, and then Sandy B. says something that has haunted me for the rest of my life: “Relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last.”
Is that true?????? What is that based on? I saw this movie when I was way too young to have a concept of what a relationship is actually like, and I definitely filed this away as conventional wisdom. Better not start a relationship under intense circumstances, idiot! They never last! But what qualifies as “intense circumstances”? Is there really a scientifically significant data set on the divorce rate among couples who met when trapped in a bus that would blow up if it went under fifty miles per hour? What if you meet on a roller coaster? Or a haunted elevator? My husband and I met at a very stressful and off-putting party full of cool snobs. Does that count? Are we doomed? I hate it when people just say things!!!
Anyway, Keanu tells Dennis they’re going to make the drop, and Dennis is still watching the looped video like a dumbass so he doesn’t realize that the bus blew up. Apparently, the news (which he is obsessively watching) didn’t report “massive explosion at LAX,” even though you could definitely see that smoke from downtown. Look out the window of your derelict mannequin factory, Dennis! Then he spies a glitch in the loop, realizes the ruse, and heads to Pershing Square to fuck these cops up.
For some reason, the LAPD makes Sandy B. come along with them and sit in an ambulance while they finish arresting Dennis Hopper. What???????? Can’t she go home??? Why on earth does Sandy have to go to the drop? She lives in Venice! It’s not even like downtown is on the way back from LAX!
Of COURSE she instantly hops out of the ambulance and runs into Dennis, who is dressed as a cop and takes her hostage. Good job, cops!
The cops, like a million of them, wait and wait for Dennis to come get the package out of the garbage can, but he never does. Because it turns out he squizzled a hole ’neath the can so he could squeak up and bungle it away with his great twiddly sneak fingers!
They eventually figure out the hole trick and, for some fucking reason, Keanu jumps down in there alone—because who needs these eleven thousand trained snipers (who are literally already there!) when you’re going to confront the murderous and tricky bomb king? Keanu is overconfident, he thinks he has the upper hand on Dennis—“Pop quiz, asshole!”—but, shit, it’s actually Sandy, and she is COVERED in bomb.
“A bomb is made to explode,” says Dennis eccentrically. “That’s its meaning, its purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming.”
They’re on the subway. Now it’s Speed on a train. Dennis makes Sandy hold this trigger device so he can murder the train driver and check out his loot. He opens the money bag and it squirts purple paint in his face and all over the money. “My money!!!” You can’t buy a Jet Ski with purple money! Everyone knows that!
Keanu and Dennis climb up onto the roof of the subway where they fist-fight. Yo, Dennis, no offense, but you are one million years old. There’s no way you can beat up Keanu! And, indeed, he does not. He gets his head whacked off by a lamp on the subway tunnel roof. THAT’S YOUR PENSION NOW, BITCH!
Even worse for Dennis, Sandy asks Keanu what happened to Dennis and he says, “He lost his head.” A freaking ruthless roast!!!!!
But it’s not over yet! Dennis also broke the train so they cannot stop it, and now the subway track is finished. Keanu knows what to do, though—he’s gonna fly the train like he flew the bus! The thing about Keanu is that he learned stuff from what happened before!
He cranks up the speed, sits down sensually with Sandy to snuggle while they die, and I tell you that train pops right up out of the street like the snake I just found in my peanut brittle! Keanu and Sandy skid to a halt amid the rubble and make out HARD. They are troublingly horny considering how recently they decapitated a dude!
Keanu: I’ve heard relationships based on intense experiences never work.
Sandy: Okay, we’ll have to base it on sex, then.
Keanu: Okay, ma’am.3
Then all the Hollywood tourists high-five and take pictures because they love two hot, dirty people kissing in a burning subway car that just exploded out of the earth like a Tremors worm.
This is the greatest love story ever told. RIP, Helen.
RATING: 9/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 USE THIS LINE IN THE REBOOT!!!!!!!!
2 MOTHERFUCKING APRIL 2020!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOW, A TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3 It has come to my attention that in Speed 2: Cruise Control Sandra Bullock is in a “relationship” on a “boat” with Jason Patric, but experts agree that SPEED 2 IS NOT CANON. THE COMMITTEE DOES NOT RECOGNIZE THE VALIDITY OF SPEED 2 OR BOATS.
The Shawnsnake Redumptruck
The Shawshank Redemption is a movie about how prison used to be pretty bad (like, at least 4–5 percent more bad than it is now, I think!). Tim Robbins is Andy Dufresne, a fancy banker who is falsely convicted of his wife’s murder in a kind of Night-the-Lights-Went-Out-in-Georgia-style whoopsie-daisy, and gets two consecutive life sentences. (So that’s how you put a banker in prison! #topical)
Over at Shumptruck State Priz, Morgan Freeman is not getting paroled, AS USUAL. He explains, folksily, that he’s the guy who smuggles in contraband such as cigarettes, pornos, and geological fieldwork equipment. “Yessir, I’m a regular Sears and Roebuck.” (Pretty sure the cigarettes/porno/rock hammer Sears is a specialty branch.) He is also the narrator of the prison.
When Andy shows up, prison’s like, “Hey, welcome to prison. We hired Clancy Brown to be mean to you.” Not a terrible crime reduction tactic, TBH!
While the guards hose and flour all the new inmates, Morgan Freeman and his prison friends—Richie Aprile, the Grim Reaper from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, an old guy with a bird in his shirt, and three to four Tom Waits cosplayers—place bets on which one of the new guys is going to cry first. Turns out, it’s the fat one, OF COURSE (can fat people be afforded no dignity?), who starts screaming for his mommy as soon as they turn the lights off. Everyone has an early morning of pointless toil, gallows humor, and grimacing, so Clancy Brown murders the crying fat man with his Clancy Brown Murder Stick.
At breakfast the next day, Andy finds a maggot in his porridge, so he gives it to the dude with the shirt-bird who’s like, “Jake says thank you!” NO, HE DIDN’T. I WATCHED THE WHOLE THING. HE SAID, “CHEEP CHEEP.” #GASLIGHTING
During his post-breakfast shower, Andy is approached by a red-haired fellow who is one of the FBI agents who is mean to Chris Tucker in Rush Hour and also indicates that he would like to initiate a sexual relationship: “Hey, anybody come at you yet? Anybody get to you yet? Hey, we all need friends in here. I could be a friend to you. Hey. Hard to get. I like that.” (Yo, guy, read The Rules. Neediness is a turnoff.) Morgan Freeman advises Andy to “grow eyes in the back of [his] head,” which I’m pretty sure is impossible, but apparently some people in prison can speak bird, so what do I know. Andy fails to grow the extra eyes in time and is horrifically beaten and raped. It is the worst.
Andy asks Morgan Freeman to get him a rock hammer, and Morgan Freeman is like, “What is that, weirdo?” and Andy’s like, “My hobby is hitting rocks with a hammer?—just get me one,” and when it arrives, Morgan Freeman is all, “LOLOLOL, THIS IS A VERY TINY HAMMER,” and Andy is all, “You do you, me do me!!!” The downplaying of the hammer’s power becomes very important for a later switcheroo. Note it.
One day, all the guys are tarring the roof of the license plate factory when Clancy Brown starts going on and on about how he’s inheriting $35,000 from his dead brother, but he doesn’t want to pay a b
unch of stupid dead-brother taxes. “Uncle Sam,” he gripes, “he puts his hand in your shirt and squeezes your tit till it’s purple.” (Sir, real quick, do you mean Uncle Sam the fictional patriotic dandy? Or do you have an actual abusive uncle named Sam? Oh my god, is that how your brother died?) Andy tells Clancy Brown that he’s a banker and offers to fix his tax problems if Clancy Brown will give everyone beer. And here’s why Andy is so cool: he DOESN’T EVEN WANT THE BEER. (Andy, please, have a beer. You’re in prison.)
After that, Andy and Morgan Freeman decide that they are best friends.
Back in his cell one night, Andy is playing around with his rock hammer when a huge chunk of wall just glops off into his hand. Hey, prison, what the fuck is your wall made of? Ehhhhh, cookie dough. Pretty sure your main job is walls. You did it bad.
Now that Andy is frenemies with Clancy Brown, he finally has some protection from the rape gang. Goodbye, super unpleasant subplot!
Everything is really coming up Andy during this period. He is no longer being violently assaulted on the reg, he gets a job working in the library with Shirt-Bird, he starts doing all the guards’ taxes and memorizing their secrets, and the warden doesn’t mind if he does his stupid rock carving as long as he keeps pretending to care about Jesus. He is truly the best at being a prisoner ever.
UNTIL. Shirt-Bird gets paroled, even though he is two hundred years old and hasn’t been outside prison since a car was called an “electric horse.” He goes to live at a halfway house and gets a job bagging groceries, and he is very lonely and it is very terrible. Plus, for some reason, he decides he HAS TO HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS HIS BIRD. (Dude, I don’t know how it was in the 1870s, but they have birds outside prison now! I’m sure there are mad grubs in the halfway house gruel.) So then, since they won’t let him go back to prison and bird never even calls anymore (dick!!!!!), Shirt-Bird kills himself and it is the saddest, worst thing ever to happen in any movie. Until the other worst thing that happens later in this movie. Ugh, this movie!