It’s disheartening to think of what could have been, with a better script, with a different local, with Reeves back. Her cluelessness is played for laughs, but it all feels forced. Worst of all, Sandra’s character Annie, who never really feels like the same character from the first movie, is introduced as not just a bad driver, but literally the world’s worst driver. It’s easy to imagine de Bont (who has a story credit) asking, “What if we opened on an ice cream truck chase?” Let’s be honest - the opening fifteen minutes of the movie is its worst, with an action scene so awkwardly shot and constructed it feels like something from a direct-to-video movie. Speed 2 does feel rushed and slapped together, like there was never much of a screenplay, but more of an outline.
#NEED FOR SPEED 2 MOVIE PREVIEW FULL#
Sandra told Pete Hammond that she signed on for the project, traveled to the Bahamas, started shooting the movie, and kept asking the director, the producers, anyone who would listen, a pretty obvious question: “Where’s a script? Can I see a script?” And apparently she never saw one, or at least, a full one. After A Time to Kill opened so big, Sandra was on top of the world, and the following year should’ve been her time to star in a project that marked her biggest commercial success yet. Although she bounced back immediately the following year with the underrated Hope Floats, the heavily promoted Speed 2 became so bashed and maligned that by the end of 1997, there might have been some doubt as to whether Sandra could bounce back. If the previous winter’s In Love and War was a disappointing misfire for Sandra, Speed 2: Cruise Control should go down as one of her most fatal career mistakes. By the time Speed 2 was released, Sandra was a mega-star, a household name, and one of a select few Hollywood actresses who could open a movie based on her name alone.īut then everything came crashing down.
The three years that followed were very kind to Sandra, with three more big hits ( While You Were Sleeping, The Net, and A Time to Kill). It made a star out of Sandra, gave Keanu Reeves a jump-start to his leading man career, and allowed cinematographer-turned-director de Bont to become one of the most sought-after filmmakers of his time. In the summer of 1994, the biggest surprise sensation at nationwide movie theaters was Jan de Bont’s Speed, a rousing, kinetic action yarn that was pushed up from late August to early June to become one of the hugest hits of the year. Speed 2 has some of that charm at times, but it remains a major disappointment, mainly because it should have been so much better. There’s a certain charm to many of those overdone summer action films of the late 1990s, a sense of fun that seems to have been erased from at least fifty percent of the summer movies we see nowadays.
Is the 1997 action flop as bad, though, as many of the blockbuster duds that have waded in and out of multiplexes all these years since? Not so much.
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