
And there is a joke about a speeding bus in the final scene (which you can also see in the film's trailers). And Glenn Plummer, whose Jaguar was trashed in the first film shows up here to have his new $100,000 boat trashed.
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And after the cruise liner is hijacked, Bullock says, "I swear I am never leaving the house again!" (an obvious ripoff of a similar crack made by Bruce Willis in "Die Hard 2"). And Joe Morton, who played Reeves' SWAT team captain, shows up (unbilled) as Patric's boss in the opening sequence. Early in the film, Bullock makes a statement about her old boyfriend, referring to Keanu Reeves' character in the first film. Well, OK, there are some glancing references: what does this film have to do with the first? that is, Bullock and the built-in moneymaking moniker "Speed 2". (And even if the suite had a VCR, this doesn't seem like a video Bullock's character would choose.)Īnd while I'm on a rant here, let's define "sequel." Is "Speed 2: Cruise Control" really a sequel? I mean, is it enough to just have Sandra Bullock playing the same character?Īnd what runaway vehicle will she climb aboard next? An out-of-control helicopter? "Speed 3: Chopper Blades"?īeyond the obvious. But because luxury cruises are designed to be ever so family-friendly, showing "Lolita" that way is, at best, unlikely.

And if I had never been on an ocean liner I might not have thought much about it. The movie is piped into Bullock and Patric's suite on the closed-circuit television system. (The continuity editor must have been off at a limbo contest.)īut my favorite goofy thing in "Speed 2" is "Lolita." That's right, Stanley Kubrick's black-and-white 1962 film with James Mason and Sue Lyon, about a middle-aged man's affair with a sexy teenager. There are a lot of mistakes of this kind - shoes that are on and then off, still waters when the ship is supposed to be moving, clouds in the sky that come and go within seconds, etc. For example, there's a dramatic I-am-the-hero moment when Patric takes off his shirt, lets his pecs bask in the sun and runs through some hallways in the ship - and when he emerges on deck seconds later, he's wearing a different shirt! (My wife leaned over and whispered, "He must have gone through the ship's mall.") The most obvious are continuity errors, which a lot of moviegoers have already mentioned to me. (And I'm beginning to think audiences don't care about plot and character anymore, especially after the huge, if not unexpected, success of "The Lost World.") Storywise, that's about it.But there are plenty of dumb moments in "Speed 2" in addition to the silly plotting and lack of character development.

SWAT cop (Jason Patric) and his girlfriend (Sandra Bullock) try to stop him.

If "Speed" was a white-knuckle thriller, "Speed 2" is a knucklehead thriller.īefore we get into this, however, let's recap the story line - for the benefit of those who've been living in a cave for the past month: "Speed 2: Cruise Control" is about a lone wolf terrorist/thief (Willem Dafoe) on a Caribbean cruise ship who blows up a lot of stuff while an L.A.
