SPEED: 4K UHD Blu-ray (2oth Century-Fox, 1994) Buena Vista Home Entertainment

There is something, if not much, to be said of a movie to take a thimble’s worth of a premise – people on a bus, jerry-rigged with a bomb – and effectively stretch it to almost two-hours of nail-biting good thrills. Director, Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994) is one of those mindless summer blockbusters with a one-note premise that, ironically, provides endless exhilaration, even at a glance, and, like heroin, is as addictive as it remains highly watchable over and over again. Slickly written by Graham Yost, in a nutshell this one pits buff L.A. cop, Jack Trevan (Keanu Reeves) against a would-be terrorist, the aptly named Howard ‘Payne’ (Dennis Hopper) who, after being foiled in his first mission to kill a bunch of people in a highrise elevator, decides to make Trevan his life’s work by planting a bomb on a city bus to explode if its speed drops below 50mph. That this blip of a byline should sustain seems highly improbable, especially as the leading man is thoroughly wooden eye-candy. Even Reeves’ frantic declaration “There’s a bomb on the bus!” appears to have been read off delayed text from a malfunctioning teleprompter. Aside; I have never understood Keanu Reeves’ appeal. The Beirut-born Reeves, hailing from a blended heritage of English, Hawaiian, Chinese, Irish, and Portuguese, is as bloodless a stud as Hollywood has yet to produce. Ostensibly, Reeves is in his (choke!) prime in Speed: a problem, since apart from his taut and sinewy frame, and, the moments he has to go full-on gallant, leaping in, out, and, even off of moving vehicles, he miserably fails to carry the load in scenes that pit Jack against the uber-psycho-villain, Howard. Even with co-star, Jeff Daniels (as Harry Temple) or his romantic sparring with Sandra Bullock, as the perpetually frazzled and tart-mouthed, Annie Porter, Reeves is decidedly out of his depth. And yet, despite what may otherwise first appear as an insurmountable handicap – a star with zilch charisma – Speed clings together as a marvelously intense actioner. It really is a mystery as to why it should work so completely.  But it does and that is about all you really need to know before delving more deeply into its very shallow plot.

Screenwriter, Yost, his father, Elwy, better known to Canadian audiences as the ‘then’ reigning host of Saturday Night at the Movies (1974-99) brought the movie Runaway Train, a 1985 actioner starring Jon Voight, very loosely based on an idea by Akira Kurosawa, to his son’s attention. Graham decided its premise would have played much better on a bus, upping the speed from 20 to 50 mph and ditching the word ‘Minimum’ initially placed in front of his own working title ‘Speed’. For further inspiration, Graham turned to 1976’s Silver Streak. Yost's rough draft was confined to the bus, its climax - an epic explosion near the famed Hollywood sign. At this juncture, Paramount expressed interest, looking to director, John McTiernan, whose track record with summer blockbusters was impeccable – Predator  (1987), Die Hard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990). However, McTiernan was not at all interested in Speed at which point Paramount withdrew its support. Undaunted, Yost, who had approached de Bont to produce, took the movie over to 2oth Century-Fox. Again, the project was green-lit, this time on the condition to incorporate more action apart from the bus. The studio also brought in script doctor, Paul Attanasio, to flesh out and rework certain scenes. In the eleventh hour, literally days before principal photography was to begin, de Bont hired Joss Whedon to spruce up the dialogue. According to Yost, Whedon did a complete rewrite – the biggest changes made to Trevan, to minimize and/or eliminate the glibness in his exchanges, crafting a more polite than pithy hero.

Reeves had not been the first choice. Indeed, Speed ought to have gone to Stephen Baldwin – who declined the role – then, a virtual who’s who of popular stars like Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson. Yet, nothing crystalized. De Bont ultimately went with Reeves after seeing his performance in Point Break (1991). For Traven, de Bont envisioned a ‘strong and stoic’ type who could handle himself in any situation. To this end, Reeves arrived on set with his trademark locks completed shaved, a decision that took everyone by surprise. Reeves also enlisted the help of a personal trainer at Gold's Gym to get him into prime physical condition. Alas, as Speed entered its second month of production, Reeves was put off his mettle by the passing of River Phoenix, whom he regarded as a close personal friend. De Bont obliged his star, shooting around him and giving Reeves ample time to prepare and overcome his personal sorrow and anxieties. As for the part of Annie Porter, initially written as a hard-edged paramedic, de Bont offered it first to Halle Berry – who turned it down. The role was then reworked as a comic sidekick with comedian, Ellen DeGeneres in mind. Ultimately, when Sandra Bullock signed on, the role again was reworked to accommodate a rocky sort of rom/com chemistry – only half-serious, but enough to make the audience care about the character’s ultimate fate.

One of Speed’s set pieces is the race along Interstates 105 and 110. At the time, the freeway had not yet been completed, de Bont noticing huge gaps in its suspended highway, triggering an idea to have the bus in the movie make an incredible leap across this chasm. As the logistics of performing such a stunt made it virtually impossible, de Bont settled for a reasonable facsimile; the bus, projected off a ramp by air canon, momentarily airborne with only a driver inside – suspended by wires to absorb the intense shock upon landing – the ‘actual’ flyover, created by having a piece of highway ‘digitally’ removed with computer-generated imagery. On the first tryout, the stunt driver missed the ramp entirely and crashed the bus, totaling it. So, a second bus was prepared. Alas, considerably lightened to ensure its ability to take momentary flight, this second bus was propelled much farther than even de Bont anticipated, coming down on one of the cameras, destroying it and ruining the shot. Mercifully, de Bont had set up more than one camera to take in the action, thus ensuring he would not have to stage the stunt a third time to get what he wanted.

Speed begins inside a high-rise where a group of business professionals are trapped in an elevator rigged to explode by blackmailer/madman, Howard Payne. As the police realize they are dealing with one sick ticket, a SWAT team, fronted by Jack Trevan and Harry Temple are called in to diffuse the situation and bring about a successful resolution to this hostage crisis. Bartering with Howard by telephone, Jack departs from the scripted negotiations and, together with Harry, prevents the death of all involved mere seconds before Howard detonates the elevator. There was never any doubt Howard intended to murder these innocent bystanders. Hence, he now regards Jack as his sworn enemy for denying him his twisted revenge. Although Howard escapes capture, Jack and Harry are made public heroes and receive citations for valor from their precinct. As far as Jack is concerned, something is decidedly off. Howard was not interested in money or negotiating. He was simply out for blood. After his promotion, Jack naively assumes he has seen the last of Howard, a complacency crudely refocused when Howard detonates a bomb on a bus, killing one of Jack’s friends.

Howard seizes the opportunity to play a deadly game of cat and mouse with Jack, informing him of another bus – loaded with passengers – to befall a similar fate…unless, Jack can devise a clever way to rescue them. Aboard is Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock), a good-natured gal, forced to play the part of the heroine after the driver, Sam (Hawthorne James) is accidentally struck by a wayward bullet. Jack makes chase in a commandeered Jaguar, boarding the bus and successfully steering it through the city’s crowded streets onto a highway leading out of greater Los Angeles. Jack discovers Howard has rigged a hidden camera to keep a live video feed of the passengers on closed circuit TV – thus preventing any needless acts of chivalry. Jack radios Harry with this intel and Harry patches into his own video feed, recorded back and looped so Howard thinks nothing has changed. Meanwhile Jack begins to evacuate everyone on board except for himself and Annie. After all, someone has to keep the bus moving at 50mph. Knowing Howard will eventually discover this ruse, Jack figures out an escape for him and Annie. The two leap to safety as the bus, with its steering wheel locked, continues to taxi in circles on an abandoned landing strip at the airport. Discovering he has been outfoxed yet again, Howard becomes outraged and more insane than ever. Now, he stalks Annie, taking her hostage aboard a moving subway and strapping her with a belt of explosives to force a showdown between him and Jack. One way or another, Howard is determined they are all going to die, unless Jack can be clever again.  Howard hijacks a subway train, handcuffing Annie to a pole and killing the driver. Jack offers a ransom, jerry-rigged with exploding dye packs. Howard takes the bait, is momentary blinded by the dye, and proceeds to do battle with Jack atop the moving train’s roof – his insanity thwarted only after a low-lying tunnel caution light decapitates him. Jack deactivates the explosives but cannot free Annie from the pole. Unable to stop the train, he instead causes it to derail, protecting Annie from the impact with his own body. Having survived their ordeal, the couple emerges relatively unscathed and locked in a passionate kiss.

Speed is rudimentary picture-making, bumped out in all the right places by Andrzej Bartkowiak’s cinematography, Jon Wright’s editing and Mark Mancina’s gripping score, all conspiring to exploit the cheap thrills, chills and narrow scrapes. In fact, De Bont’s actioner has so much style it doesn’t need substance to triumph. Seriously – apart from the narrative ‘bookends’ imposed on it by the executive brain trust at Fox, marginally to ‘open up’ the story, this is still a movie about a bomb on a bus. We cannot even credit Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock here. While Bullock does the whole ‘teary-eyed damsel in distress’ thing rather well, Reeves is a stiff-britches stick figure with no soul. Dennis Hopper is over-the-top nuts, easily to steal every scene and playing every second as unadulterated camp. De Bont’s one unforgivable moment is his shameless rip-off of William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971). In Speed, Annie is forced to plow into a baby carriage while steering the bus down a city street, only to discover it the property of a homeless woman and loaded with empty beer cans meant for the recycling station. In Friedkin's original, Gene Hackman’s relentless cop, Popeye Doyle, narrowly misses a pedestrian pushing a pram, presumably with an actual child in it, who is crossing a crowded street under an elevated train. Speed is exonerated from its thin cardboard lack of character development – even, its one-dimensional storytelling – by some rather exhilarating SFX and its clever and slick marketing as a summer blockbuster to get and sustain the audience’s adrenaline. As a popcorn muncher of the most vacuous sort, Speed is effective and good fun besides – and that is all it ever really needs to be.

Speed was shot photochemically for the now defunct 2oth Century-Fox. Aside: it breaks my heart to acknowledge that legendary studio’s demise. And for those nervously anticipating, Disney Inc. - the asset management holding company of all Fox’s legacy now - has mercifully retained the iconic Fox logo and fanfare to precede the main titles, everything newly remastered in 4K and cribbing from an original camera negative, color graded in HDR10 with a decided uptick in overall image quality from the 2006 Fox Blu-ray. In the infancy of Fox’s own commitment to Blu-ray, Speed in hi-def was plagued by edge enhancement and digital noise. For this new-to-UHD-Blu, Disney has gone back to basics, rendering a superb scan in which minute details truly pop, and film grain takes center stage, looking very indigenous to its source. Colors are fully saturated. Flesh tones appear quite natural. A note about the color here: Speed was never meant to look like a Mexican fiesta on Olivera Street, and the HDR here maintains Andrzej Bartkowiak’s subtle palette, complimenting it with a wider color gamut to perfectly recreate the movie’s sun-bathed and orange-leaning look. Shadow delineation is ever-so-slightly enriched. A minor quibbling: Disney has ported over the identical 5.1 DTS from the ’06 Blu rather than going for a full monty Dolby Atmos re-mix. Arguably, the ‘heavy lifting’ was already done by Fox, because Speed’s audio remains enveloping.  

The 4K disc ports over two previously recorded audio commentaries, the first by de Bont, the second from Yost and producer, Mark Gordon. We’ll give Disney props for re-authoring the standard Blu-ray, also included in this package, from this new 4K scan. Disney has given the Blu-ray all the bells and whistles of a major release, including new menus with the 2oth Century ‘Studios’ re-branding, both audio commentaries, plus most of the goodies made available by Fox for its long-defunct ‘Five Star’ edition DVD – material, ironically, shorn from its own Blu-ray release in 2006, but reinstated here. For those still hanging on to the retired Five Star DVD, this Blu-ray does not contain the following extras: original script, press kit, production notes or multi-angle storyboards, image gallery, and, roughly 30-min. of video interviews to have featured cast and crew. And the extras included here, including the half-hour 'making of', have been dumped in the 480i condition of their original presentation on DVD, given no further consideration to stabilize or correct the digital anomalies plaguing them from the outset. Bottom line: Disney Inc. has put its best foot forward where it counts – on the 4K video master of the feature. Speed looks incredible in UHD. For those yet unable to take full advantage, the Mouse House has also provided a reasonable facsimile of their latest efforts on standard Blu-ray. Highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

3