Pop quiz, asshole.

Speed — 4/5

I've grown to believe that when a movie hits, it's less because of the specific ins-and-outs of 'hey, it's a solid movie' and more that it feels like something new. I love 'The Fall Guy' but I'd now argue that it's relative failure belongs to it being just a solid movie. It was charming, and fun, in ways I'd seen before, but rearranged. That's not enough. But I can clearly see in my mind movie audiences looking at "Speed" and seeing something they haven't quite seen before, and I can see movie executives looking at it and saying "I see a new template." And I am not knowledgeable enough nor do I have a good enough memory to say if this template really existed before then—arguably in bits and pieces in other movies, and I'm sure in cult movies, but perhaps never put in front of the world as a big action film with bona fide movie stars in the blockbuster era. I think some of those people watching the movie, scrambling for exactly what it is that is new about this, might look at it and say the template is "entire movie built around silly action set-piece," and therefore you got movies in its wake built around silly action set-pieces... but that's just the executional details. That's just the excuse for enabling the big shift as I see it which is momentum. It's a chase movie without the chase. It's a countdown movie. You're just constantly moving, the big enemy a giant ticking clock on the wall. Keep moving, moving, no time to settle down, and the movie nips and tucks character development within the 'ramp up excitement every ten minutes' template. And for that in order to work, you need control of the fundamentals. For these movies to be what they are, they can't just be a new template—they have to have an ounce of that traditional mode of movie-making: actors with chemistry. Sandra Bullock is great in this!! She, too, feels like something new, and I need to watch a few more of her early movies to figure out exactly what that is. She seems proto-manic pixie dream girl, minus the indie twee (so just "college girl with equal mixture spark and anxiety" is the best I've got so far). Keanu, as he does, carries a movie with full belief in confronting a confusing situation. The movie's only fault really is not really knowing how to end. I wonder if it could have just ended with Keanu and Sandra escaping the bus. The movie feels the need to keep pushing bigger and bigger instead of accepting it's already big. But fuck it, the subway's got some iconic moments, so whatever, I'll get over it. But overall—this felt like something new, and still feels like something that I haven't quite seen replicated to the same degree. I think a movie's success can be half defined by how many pale imitators are birthed in its wake who are both worse than it and more successful than it, and you can see a direct line between this movie and every single thing that Michael Bay has done. Though he only understood the template without ever once getting the fundamentals right.