SPEED

REVIEWED BY CHARITY BISHOP

Our rating: 3 out of 5

Because of: foul language, violence

Rated:

Life is never easy as a police officer. For Jack (Keanu Reeves) it becomes intense every day he's on the job. When a psycho maniac wires an elevator to explode with a haggle of people in it, the local police are phoned in to deal with the trapped employees. Using intelligence and peril, Jack and his partner Harry (Jeff Daniels) manage to save the lives of everyone involved... but didn't count on the madman escaping. Believed destroyed in a massive explosion, their resident serial terrorist (Dennis Hopper) has a new game for Jack to play: this time he's hot-wired a downtown bus. When the speedometer hits 50, if they go under that speed again, it will explode.

Payne gives Jack the number of the bus, and his day in hell begins. On the bus is Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock), a woman recently deprived of her driver's license for speeding. There's also a hyper tourist, an older married couple, some businessmen, and a criminal. In the initial conflict the driver is shot. If Jack takes anyone off the bus, it will blow. Instead he has to figure out how to keep them clear of traffic, save the driver's life, and dismantle the explosive before they run out of gas or time. Payne wants a fortune in exchange for the lives on the bus, to be delivered in a bag to a local trash can. He's not about to stop at anything to get what he wants. In the meantime the police are desperately trying to track him down and keep running into brick walls. Not everyone will survive the intense ride on the doomed public transport; they just have to hang on for their lives. The plot is basically an excuse for high-powered action.

For an action film, Speed is actually very good. There's never a moment without nail-biting scenes of peril in some form, whether it's a plummeting elevator, a bus crashing through barricades, a massive explosion that takes out the entire block, or trying to dismantle a bomb without scraping your head against the pavement flying by. Performances are actually quite good. The villain is interesting but his motivations are never fully explained. There's little or no time for character development, and you gather the impression that the ending relationship of Jack and Annie will be built on physical attraction rather than everlasting love. If you don't like intense, stay away, but if you're in the mood for a good thriller, this one is perfect. I saw it edited for network television so fortunately I was spared the vile language of the original, which includes 16 f-words, 7 abuses of Jesus' name, 4 of GD, and numerous mild profanities. There's no outright sexual content but several derogatory names for the male anatomy, two references to sex, and the fact that a woman's skirt rides up as she's pulled from a falling elevator.

Violence is extreme with the bus smashing through walls, platforms, other cars, and occasionally narrowly missing pedestrians. (A baby buggy flips into the air, only to spill out tin cans.) There are explosions; one of them takes out an empty airplane, another a parking garage. A man is graphically decapitated (bloodless); another is stabbed in the ear with a screwdriver. A police officer is shot by his partner to disarm a terrorist's threat. Characters talk about a woman's body falling beneath the wheels of a bus, when an explosion takes her life as she's trying to jump off. Wait for the edited version and you won't have to forge through bad language. Otherwise it's a nice brainless thriller that packs an adrenaline-driven wallop.

© www.charitysplace.com - all rights reserved.