Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

Speed 2: Cruise Control arrives as the sequel nobody requested, substituting a bus for a luxury liner and Keanu Reeves for Jason Patric. The result is a film that moves at the pace of a holiday brochure. Jan de Bont, who dreamed the premise during a nightmare about a cruise ship striking an island, spends a reported $160 million to realize that dream, and the ocean does not care. Willem Dafoe's John Geiger skulks through corridors with a grudge and a laptop, hacking the ship's autopilot while the passengers evacuate at a leisurely clip. The largest and most expensive stunt ever filmed waits at the end, and everything before it feels like waiting for a bus that is not coming.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a mild vintage at best. The supporting cast is notably multiracial (Temuera Morrison, Glenn Plummer, Royale Watkins, Tamia, Joe Morton), yet the film never remarks on it; the actors are simply present. Sandra Bullock's Annie takes a chainsaw to a jammed fire door and pulls trapped passengers to safety, and the film treats this as ordinary action business, offering no argument about gender. The villain nurses a grievance against the cruise line that dismissed him after he contracted copper poisoning, a faint whiff of corporate complaint that never ripens into class politics. The plot's oil tanker collision threatens an environmental catastrophe, though the tanker exists to supply suspense, not a message.

Elsewhere the cellar is bare. No LGBTQ characters, no body-positive casting, no neurodivergent themes (a deaf girl appears briefly in an elevator, a physical disability used as a plot device and nothing more), no revisionist history, no sermonizing. The film wants only to entertain, and it does so with the enthusiasm of a man reading a safety pamphlet aloud. We are left with a curious artifact: a blockbuster that provoked no cultural argument of any kind, and lost money doing it. Eight Golden Raspberry nominations followed, one of which it won. The sommelier's note reads: thin, flat, no tannins, no aftertaste.