Speed 2: Cruise Control [1997]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

This movie is a problem right out of the gate. It's called "Speed 2: Cruise Control" and there is nothing speedy about this movie. First of all, it's a little over two hours long and definitely didn't need to be that long. It probably could have been shortened to an hour and a half without losing a thing. On a more literal level, "Speed" was about a speeding bus and this movie is about a cruise ship (get it) with a bomb on it. A cruise ship is a very slow moving vehicle. Shouldn't sequels try to up the stakes of the original? This should have been a movie about a bullet train or an airplane, not a resort that just happens to be on water. This reaches comical levels when there's a guy reading out the speed of the boat as it slows down, and it starts at 20 knots. Feel the speed! Adam proposed the theory that the script for this movie was just a generic action movie script that no one knew what to do with so they shoe-horned it into the "Speed" franchise so it would make money (basically the same thing as "10 Cloverfield Lane" except that movie is great).

Sandra Bullock's character from the first movie has a throwaway line explaining why Keanu Reeves has been replaced with some cop with a badly receding hairline as she fails a driving test. Sandra and Hairline go on a cruise where Willem Dafoe has planted a bunch of bombs because he used to work for a company associated with the cruises but they fired him for being sick. We never find out what his sickness is (something blood based since he messes with leeches a bunch) or if he has any motivation outside of being a crazy person. Basically, the film is a bunch of people running around a cruise ship for two hours. There's a disturbing subplot where this deaf teenager gets a big crush on Hairline after he talks to her in ASL. Fifteen is exactly the right age to ensure that she's too old for it to be cute and too young for it to be acceptable. Later on he watches "Lolita" in the hotel room to really emphasize the yikes. Also the film ends with the ship driving all the way into St. Martin and causing a bunch of damage. This is one of the funniest parts of the film but you need to wait forever to get to it. 

Otherwise, there's plenty of great Dafoe faces, a plastic container falling off a shelf with a glass breaking sound effect, and some really bad effects. The movie has a lot of hilarious parts but it takes so long to get to them that it isn't really worth watching the whole thing. A film with its humor mostly at the end is better than a movie with the humor front-loaded but it still wasn't worth it. 

Spoon Rating: 4