Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)
director: jan de bont
cast: sandra bullock, jason patric, willem dafoe, temuera morrison, brian mccardie, christine firkins, michael g. hagerty, colleen camp, lois chiles, francis guinan, tamia, jeremy hotz, enrique murciano, jessica diz, connie ray
Keanu Reeves looks like a frickin' genius for avoiding a potential career iceberg. Unfortuntely for Sandra Bullock, she did board this "speed on a boat" and Jan De Bont rewards her by relegating her to the chore of "comic" relief to brooding cop Jason Patric and then later as a hapless hostage to Willem Defoe.
Just analyzing this shit is making
my brain bleed but here it goes: whiny and 
ultra-annoying
Bullock is on a cruise ship vacation with her stiff-as-a-board boyfriend Jason
Patric so they can work on their relationship (like anyone cares about these
two knuckle-heads). A disgruntled Dafoe goes-postal when he is fired from the
cruise line after he's diagnosed with copper poisoning from working with their
computers (?). Dafoe brings a laptop onboard so he can hack into (another completely
exhausted cliche) the ship's computer system and take it over. He also brings
along a jar full of leeches to suck his poisoned blood. I have to admit that
I do like this one detail of an otherwise boring psycho. To make Dafoe's motives
and thinking even more muddy, he programs the ship to collide with an oil tanker
while he steals millions of dollars worth of diamond jewelry onboard the ship.
Is his motive revenge or greed? He's not the main character so his motivation
should be fairly straight-forward. To make matters worse, when Dafoe could escape,
he takes Bullock hostage for no other reason than to somehow involve her in
the plot.
The end of the movie has the most expensive stunt ever filmed and it is amazingly unspectacular. The liner does a slow crash through a pier and a couple of buildings while bystanders mug like they're in a "Little Rascals" short. Also, Jan De Bont carries on the recent tradition of foreign directors who raise the specter of pederasty for no reason whatsoever. In this case, between Jason Patric and a fourteen year-old deaf girl who looks disturbingly like Jon Bennet-Ramsey! Roman Polanski, Atom Egoyan and Luc Besson better look out! -- Tom Graney
$0.25 (a penny for every leech)
© 1997 Hollywood Outsider™