{"id":2652,"date":"2024-08-22T02:32:36","date_gmt":"2024-08-22T02:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=2652"},"modified":"2024-10-14T15:06:36","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T19:06:36","slug":"speed-2-cruise-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/08\/22\/speed-2-cruise-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Speed 2: Cruise Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Speed 2: Cruise Control <\/strong>(1997)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 20th<\/sup> Century Fox\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 125 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (frenetic disaster action and violence, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Jan de Bont\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Mark Mancina\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jack N. Green\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: June 13, 1997 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Sandra Bullock, Jason Patric, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison, Brian McCardie, Christine Finkins, Michael G. Hagerty, Colleen Camp, Lois Chiles, Francis Guinan, Tamia, Jeremy Hotz, Enrique Murciano Jr., Jessica Diaz, Connie Ray, Patrika Darbo, Kimmy Robertson, Charles Parks, Susan Barnes, Royale Watkins, Bo Svenson, Glenn Plummer, Tim Conway.\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $48.6M (US)\/$164.5M (World)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: NO STARS!!!<\/p>\n

\u00a0The title Speed 2: Cruise Control<\/strong> is itself a fallacy. Altogether now; 1, 2, 3. CRUISE SHIPS DON\u2019T SPEED! What the fork are the makers trying to pull here? Even worse, the movie doesn\u2019t move any faster than the ocean liner where the \u201caction\u201d takes place. It drags on interminably for more than two hours. All the while, we wish somebody, ANYBODY, would throw Sandra Bullock overboard. Her character is so annoying this time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Oh, here I go getting ahead of myself again. I should start from the beginning. Speed 2: Cruise Control<\/strong> holds the dishonor of being the second worst sequel I\u2019ve ever seen. It held the number one spot for nearly a decade until Basic Instinct 2 came along and blew it out of the water (in a manner of speaking). It\u2019s still just as awful as it ever was and always will be. It\u2019s a brain dead mix of Die Hard, The Poseidon Adventure and The Love Boat.<\/p>\n

\u00a0If anybody ever questioned Keanu Reeves\u2019 intelligence, his decision not to reprise his role in this water-logged sequel should erase all doubt. He\u2019s replaced by Jason Patric (The Lost Boys), taking himself way too seriously as Alex Shaw, a maverick SWAT officer romantically involved with the heroine of the first movie Annie (Bullock). It appears that Keanu\u2019s character was right about relationships based on extreme circumstances; they never work out. If that\u2019s true, Annie and Alex are royally SCREWED!<\/p>\n

\u00a0The movie opens with a chase scene involving Alex (of course). Annie somehow becomes entangled in it while taking her driving test. Naturally, she fails. It\u2019s also when she finds out Alex is an actual cop, not a beach officer like he told her. To make it up to her, he takes her on a Caribbean cruise. It happens to be the same cruise crazed bad guy Geiger (Dafoe, Wild at Heart) plans to hijack. He has a beef with the cruise company. It seems they fired him after he contracted copper poisoning while designing their on-board computer system. Now he wants payback. He takes over the ship\u2019s system and programs it to crash into an oil tanker. It falls on Alex to stop him with Annie\u2019s help.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s unreal how much Speed 2: Cruise Control<\/strong> misses the mark, especially with Jan de Bont in the driver\u2019s seat again. The first one was an unexpected hit. Who would have ever expected that Die Hard on a city bus would work? Its success guaranteed a sequel. Unfortunately, it\u2019s a sequel of the worst kind. It fails on every single level. As an action movie, it\u2019s a bore. It\u2019s neither thrilling nor exciting. It\u2019s a dull slog from one uninteresting sequence to the next. It\u2019s redundant with its scenes of Alex and\/or Annie rescuing screaming passengers from various dangers. You can barely see what\u2019s going on half the time because it\u2019s dark and rainy. By the time something semi-interesting does happen at the end, you\u2019ll have already mentally disembarked.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Bullock was great in the first Speed. She\u2019s terrible in Speed 2: Cruise Control<\/strong>. Her performance is mostly limited to flailing her arms in exasperation while exclaiming \u201cOh, God!\u201d Also, her character is completely obnoxious this time. I can\u2019t remember a time when I so wanted the bad guy to kill the leading lady and put us all out of our misery. Patric is too self-serious an actor to make an effective action hero. The material calls for an actor with a knack for kicking ass and witty one-liners after each kill. He\u2019s clearly the wrong guy for the job. Dafoe may as well have phoned it in. About the only thing that separates him from other crazed villains is the leeches he puts all over his body to suck the copper poison out of his blood. That has to be one of the dumbest things I\u2019ve ever seen or heard. What is this, the 18th<\/sup> century? The passengers are a mixed bunch of forgettable characters; the only one that stands out is the deaf teen girl (Firkins) with a crush on Alex who conveniently knows sign language. She\u2019s actually a better action heroine than Bullock. She\u2019s resourceful and doesn\u2019t panic in a crisis.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The special effects in Speed 2: Cruise Control<\/strong> look cheap which is bad considering it carries a $160 million price tag. While the sight of a cruise ship crashing through a coastal town is neat, you call tell it was done with models and miniatures.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Speed 2: Cruise Control<\/strong> has a host of other problems starting with the moronic screenplay by Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson. They take the Idiot Plot to a new level. Usually, such a plot depends on the characters being idiots. This one depends on everybody in the audience being an idiot too. Nobody but one would buy a story this colossally stupid. The dialogue is inane enough, but de Bont takes it a step further by informing us in the end credits \u201cNo oceans were polluted during the filming of this movie.\u201d What about the theaters showing it? Isn\u2019t a movie as atrocious as Speed 2: Cruise Control<\/strong> a form of pollution?<\/p>\n

\u00a0Finally, I\u2019d like to address one of my personal bugaboos about sequels in general. Most likely bowing to studio pressure, the makers toned down the action and violence in order to earn the more box office-friendly PG-13. Hey, the first one\u2019s R rating didn\u2019t hurt it any. It made more money than this stink bomb. Besides, a lousy movie is a lousy movie no matter what the rating.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Bottom line, Speed 2: Cruise Control<\/strong> is all wet.\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 20th Century Fox\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 125 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (frenetic disaster action and violence, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Jan de Bont\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Mark Mancina\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jack N. Green\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: June 13, 1997 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Sandra Bullock, Jason Patric, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison, Brian McCardie, Christine Finkins, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-this-sucks-so-bad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Speed-2-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2652"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3553,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652\/revisions\/3553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}