Speed 2: Cruise Control

1997

Directed by Jan de Bont

Welcome back to Movie Monday, where we’re continuing our journey down my personal list of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Today we’re docking at number 49: Speed 2: Cruise Control, the 1997 sequel that somehow took everything exciting about the original Speed and replaced it with… a floating hotel that moves at the breakneck pace of your grandmother’s Sunday drive.

Now, I want to be clear upfront – this list is based entirely on my opinion. Something I absolutely despise might be your guilty pleasure, and that’s perfectly fine. We can still be friends. But if you genuinely think Speed 2 is a masterpiece, we might need to have a serious conversation about your taste in cinema.

What Made Speed Work (Spoiler Alert: None of It Applies Here)

Let’s briefly remember what made the original Speed such a kinetic thrill ride. Released in 1994, it had a brilliantly simple premise: a bus with a bomb that would explode if it dropped below 50 mph. Keanu Reeves played Jack Traven, a SWAT officer who had to keep that bus moving through the streets of Los Angeles while Sandra Bullock’s Annie Porter took over driving duties. It was tense, it was fast-paced, and it worked because the entire movie was built around constant motion and escalating stakes.

The film was lean, mean, and knew exactly what it was – a high-concept action thriller that didn’t overstay its welcome. Director Jan de Bont understood that the premise was inherently ridiculous, but he committed to it completely. The result was a movie that grossed $121 million on a $30 million budget and became a legitimate cultural phenomenon.

So naturally, Hollywood decided they needed a sequel.

The Fundamental Problem: You Can’t Have Slow Speed

Here’s where we get to the core issue that makes Speed 2: Cruise Control such a spectacular failure. The clue is literally in the title of the franchise: SPEED. The entire appeal of the original was velocity, momentum, the inability to stop or slow down. So what brilliant minds at 20th Century Fox decided the perfect setting for a sequel would be… a cruise ship?

Let me break this down for you: cruise ships are specifically designed for leisurely travel. They’re floating hotels where the journey IS the destination. People go on cruises to relax, to take their time, to move at a pace that makes continental drift look hasty. The average cruise ship travels at about 20-25 mph. For context, that’s slower than most people drive through school zones.

So we have a movie called Speed that takes place on a vessel that moves with all the urgency of a DMV line. It’s like making a Fast and Furious sequel where Vin Diesel spends two hours parallel parking, or a Mission: Impossible movie where Tom Cruise’s most dangerous stunt is changing a light bulb.

Even the characters in the movie seem to understand how ridiculous this premise is. According to reports, children who saw the film complained that it was strange for a movie to take place on a ship “not capable of going more than a few knots.” When your target demographic of sugar-fueled eight-year-olds is questioning your basic logic, you might want to reconsider your creative choices.

The Keanu Exodus: How to Torpedo Your Sequel Before It Starts

The problems with Speed 2 began long before anyone set foot on a soundstage. Keanu Reeves, fresh off the success of the original, was offered $12 million to reprise his role as Jack Traven. His response? Thanks, but no thanks.

Reeves reportedly turned down the role after reading the script, and honestly, can you blame him? The man had just helped create one of the most exciting action movies of the decade, and now they wanted him to spend two hours looking concerned while standing on a deck chair. Reeves was financially secure from the success of Speed and felt he wasn’t “ready to mentally and physically” star in another action film after completing Chain Reaction.

Instead, he chose to star in The Devil’s Advocate, which filmed at the same time. According to Reeves, Fox was “furious” with his decision and released “propaganda” against him, falsely claiming he turned down the role to tour with his band Dogstar. Because apparently, the studio thought blaming rock music would somehow make their terrible sequel idea seem more appealing.

Enter Jason Patric: The Replacement Nobody Asked For

With Reeves out, the studio had to find a replacement, and they settled on Jason Patric. Now, Patric is a perfectly competent actor, but asking him to fill Keanu’s shoes in an action franchise was like asking your local community theater actor to replace Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. It’s not necessarily that Patric was bad – it’s that he was fundamentally wrong for what this movie needed.

The casting process was apparently a mess. Matthew McConaughey was considered (imagine that alternate timeline), along with Jon Bon Jovi, Christian Slater, and Billy Zane. They eventually went with Patric based on Sandra Bullock’s recommendation after she saw his performance in After Dark, My Sweet. Patric was paid between $4.5-8 million for his troubles and used his entire salary to finance his 1998 drama Your Friends & Neighbors, which tells you something about his priorities.

Here’s the kicker: Patric admitted he never saw Speed and had no intentions of seeing it. He also later confessed that “it wasn’t a good movie” and blamed director Jan de Bont’s direction for its failure. When your lead actor is publicly dunking on your movie, that’s usually not a great sign.

But perhaps most damning of all: Patric only agreed to make the film contingent on major script changes being made. When he arrived on set three months later, he discovered the script hadn’t changed at all, and he was contractually obligated to proceed. He reportedly found the entire experience “thoroughly miserable and depressing.” And if your star is miserable making the movie, how do you think audiences are going to feel watching it?

Behind the Scenes: When Money Can’t Buy Common Sense

The production of Speed 2 was like watching someone try to solve a math problem by throwing increasingly large amounts of money at it. The original Speed was made for $30 million. The sequel started with a budget of “just under $100 million” and eventually ballooned to somewhere between $110-160 million, depending on who you ask.

Where did all that money go? Well, let’s start with the fact that they rented the actual cruise ship Seabourn Legend for six weeks at $38,000 per day. Then there were the multiple ship mock-ups they had to build because, surprise, you can’t actually crash a real cruise ship into a Caribbean island without some legal complications.

The finale sequence – where the ship crashes into the port of Saint Martin – became the stuff of legend, and not in a good way. Director Jan de Bont decided against using miniatures or CGI (this was 1997, remember) and instead opted to build a $5 million, 35-building set in the actual town of Marigot, Saint Martin. Then they constructed a 150-foot replica of the ship’s bow that weighed 300 tons and sat on a 1,000-foot underwater track.

This single five-minute sequence cost $25 million – roughly one quarter of the entire budget and almost as much as the entire original Speed movie. It set records as both the largest and most expensive stunt ever filmed at the time. The irony? All that money and effort went into creating a sequence that was more impressive for its size than for any actual excitement it generated.

Oh, and here’s the best part: during construction, a hurricane struck and destroyed the set. They had to rebuild it with “hurricane-proof” buildings. Because apparently, Mother Nature also thought this movie was a bad idea.

The Critical Massacre (Featuring Roger Ebert’s Lonely Island)

When Speed 2 hit theaters on June 13, 1997, critics sharpened their knives. The film currently holds a 4% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus reading: “Speed 2 falls far short of its predecessor, thanks to laughable dialogue, thin characterization, unsurprisingly familiar plot devices, and action sequences that fail to generate any excitement.”

Entertainment Weekly called it “as slow-moving as a garbage scow.” Time magazine stated that Patric’s character was “fundamentally uninteresting.” The Los Angeles Times noted that even the film’s “big-ticket closing stunts are more impressive for their size than for any excitement they generate.”

The film has since appeared on numerous “worst sequels ever” lists, with Complex ranking it number one on their list of “The 50 Worst Sequels of All Time,” calling it “one of the worst ‘event’ movies ever conceived.”

But here’s where things get interesting: Roger Ebert, the most respected film critic of his generation, gave Speed 2 three out of four stars and called it a “truly rousing ocean liner adventure story.”

Ebert’s positive review became something of a legendary outlier. He later admitted that this was the review he had to defend more than any other he’d written and that it was frequently cited as an example of him being a poor film critic. In 2013, he wrote that his favorable review of Speed 2 “inspired more disbelief” than any other review in his career.

To his credit, Ebert stuck by his guns. At the 1999 Conference on World Affairs, he defended his review and even offered a “Speed 3” contest, challenging anyone to create a five-minute short film that takes place on something that cannot stop moving. Because if you’re going to be wrong about a movie, you might as well be wrong with style.

The Box Office Bomb That Launched a Thousand Lists

Despite opening at number one in its opening weekend with $16.2 million (just barely beating Con Air), Speed 2 quickly sank faster than the Titanic. The film’s box office dropped 54% in its second weekend, and it ultimately grossed only $48 million domestically against its massive production budget.

Worldwide, the film made $164.5 million, which sounds respectable until you factor in the production costs and marketing expenses. Moviefone and Time have both ranked it among the biggest box office bombs of all time, with estimated losses ranging from $40-70 million.

The film was nominated for eight Golden Raspberry Awards and won “Worst Remake or Sequel.” At the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, it won “Worst Sequel.” Sandra Bullock later admitted she only did the film for the money and called it “the biggest piece of crap ever made” in a 2000 interview.

Why Speed 2 Earns Its Place at Number 49

So why does Speed 2: Cruise Control land at number 49 on my worst movies list? It’s not just because it’s a bad movie – there are plenty of those. It’s because it’s a bad movie that should have been impossible to make badly.

The original Speed handed them a perfect template: simple premise, escalating stakes, constant motion. Instead, they took everything that worked and threw it overboard in favor of a floating hotel moving at the speed of bureaucracy. It’s like someone looked at Die Hard and thought, “You know what this needs? Less confined space, lower stakes, and way more shuffleboard.”

The film represents everything wrong with sequel culture – the assumption that bigger automatically means better, that more money can substitute for better ideas, and that audiences will show up for anything as long as you slap a familiar title on it.

But perhaps most frustrating of all, Speed 2 had moments where you could see a decent movie trying to escape. Willem Dafoe, despite being saddled with a ridiculous villain role, brings enough manic energy to make you wish he was in a better movie. The practical effects work, while expensive and excessive, shows real craftsmanship. And Sandra Bullock does her best to sell material that would challenge even Meryl Streep.

In the end, Speed 2: Cruise Control serves as a cautionary tale about what happens when Hollywood mistakes spectacle for excitement and thinks that throwing money at a problem is the same as solving it. It’s a movie that forgot its most important lesson: sometimes the journey is more important than the destination, especially when your destination is moving at the speed of continental drift.

The film does deserve credit for one thing though – it made us all appreciate the original Speed that much more. And sometimes, that’s the best thing a bad sequel can do.

Next week on Movie Monday, we’ll be diving into another cinematic disaster from my worst movies list, Joe’s Apartment. Until then, remember: if you’re going to make a sequel about speed, maybe don’t set it on something that moves slower than rush hour traffic.