Star: Sandra Bullock

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) – Sandra Bullock

There’s no Keanu Reeves this time round, but Sandra Bullock is back, along with the odd half decent supporting cast member.

There are some weak attemps at sitcom humour early on, followed by a Pedovore joke at the 19 minute mark (marking the beginning of a long run of similarly themed dodginess — only some of which will be recognised by the viewer, if any).

This movie eventually starts to become interesting, shortly after 20 minutes in, as the main antagonist tricks his way into the ship’s control room and secretly plants a listening device under the table, with everyone in the room oblivious.

Unfortunately, after a brief interesting patch, the movie reverts to back-to-back examples of couples fighting. Once on the TV they’re watching, then once between the last cast members. I think it’s safe to say already that this is not a particularly serious action movie, and its producers are far more interested in toying with the viewer. No wonder Keanu turned it down, in spite of him being fond of Sandra Bullock.

Before the end of the first hour, there’s a prolonged panic-fest as people try to abandom ship, someone gets stuck in a lift, some people fall off the side of the ship, etc. Hardly high quality entertainment.

By the 1 hour mark it’s got quite a mix of action and drama. It looks set for a So-So rating if it continues at this level of production. There’s people being trapped in flooded rooms, and people being trapped in rooms with bombs going off. It’s clearly not designed to be consistently pleasant viewing, but if you fast forward through what needs skipping you can still somewhat enjoy it.

Most of the last hour consists of trying to stop the ship from crashing.

In the end, I agree with the verdict from half way through, and give it a So-So rating — that’s just a couple levels shy of Bang Average, and is on a par with the original Speed movie from 1994 — this one being a bit more adventurous in its stunts, but lacking Keanu.

Speed (1994) – Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock and Dennis Hopper

People probably had more patience due to less choice in the mid 90s, but this movie begins with a lot of drama, not so much action. The first half hour is occupied by one set of mild action scenes wrapped in a load of sitcom or soap opera style nonchalant dialog based drama scenes. Then the movie’s core plot kicks in, as one bus blows up and Keanu Reeves’s character chases after another to stop it blowing up too.

By the 1 hour mark, this movie looks set for a So-So rating, and that may be underselling it based on the standards of 1994, but it may be slightly generous by today’s standards for the smooth action hero movie fan since this is a bit of a tense and simplistic drama fest with very little smooth hero business or intriguing plot at work.

By the end, the verdict hasn’t changed. I rate it So-So. It does well to hold attention, in spite of constant stress & frustration, considering it’s such a simple plot — I put that down to the star power of the core cast members.

Demolition Man (1993) – Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock

Demolition Man (1993)

This was a pretty good action movie in the 90s. It has an interesting core concept and some entertaining scenes. Some good action and some good humour. But the action does get a bit monotonous at times – some of the action scenes could do with condensing.

Sylvester Stallone plays the policeman, Sandra Bullock plays his partner on the force, and Wesley Snipes plays the outlaw they’re trying to apprehend. They all do a decent job but are working with a fairly mediocre script here, even though the core concept is quite creative. In fact it might not be creative at all – it might just be a sneak preview of what’s really on its way, since many of the strange futuristic concepts in this movie are already half way standardised in the real world today. Having said that, after a long, over-extended, thinly-spread monotonous action scene near the end, the very ending of this movie is actually quite a pleasant one as the friendly/draconian society returns to time more tolerable and everyone left alive gets along just fine with the saviour/dictator gone and his mercenary too.

Overall I rate it an (upper) OK movie, considering its quality & density of entertainment value for action movie fans.

The Net (1995) – Sandra Bullock

The Net is another hacking-themed movie from the 90s (alongside the likes of Hackers and The Steal, which incidentally were both also released in 1995). It takes us back to the days of Windows 3.11, 3.5 inch floppy discs, boxy CRT computer screens, stiff-clicking corded mouses and big noisy clunky-keyed keyboards.

Sandra Bullock stars in this movie as a computer expert and innocent hacker called Angela Bennett, who stumbles across something relating to economic sabotage and murder, which some powerful people who have eyes in everything digital are hunting her for. They change her identity and make her life hell as she generally evades them and eventually exposes them, killing some of them and getting her life back.

Sandra was a big star in the 90s, having starred in Speed and Speed II alongside Keanu Reeves. She’s always a convincing actress.

The main antagonist in The Net is Jack Devlin, played quite well by Jeremy Northam, and his sidekick Ruth Marx is played well by Gazelle Ruth.

Dennis Miller also does a decent job as Dr Alan Champion – Angela’s old therapist-turned-lover now estranged, who seems to be the only person she can turn to who knows her in the real (offline) world and may potentially be able to help her (until they kill him also).

This movie commits the common Hollywood faux pas of nerding out about other movies for way too long, as if the non Hollywood audience is into that – in this case it was a cringeworthy 5 or 10 minute session of Sandra and Jeremy both worshipping Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) while they’re meant to be on a date.

Strangely, this movie also ends with the Whiter Shade Of Pale by Annie Lennox – the same song that the movie Hackers ends with, which came out in the same year.

Overall, The Net is an OK movie if you haven’t seen it in many years. There’s a lot of mild action and an intense atmosphere, a bit like an old fashioned cop drama. It’s more than Watchable, but is not quite fascinating enough to be ranked anywhere higher than just OK in my opinion. Still, being OK is a respectable achievement here – if it weren’t kind of captivating in both theme and function like it is, I wouldn’t have ranked it OK here. Do check it out if you’ve not seen it before – you might enjoy it on a day when you’re busy with other things.