5) Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)
The original movie lived up to its name. A real kinetic treat. Even dumbass Keanu Reeves got in on the heat of the chase. So what the fuck happened here? How did this get past pre-production? The elephant in the room is the fact that you’re not going to get any Speed off a cruise-liner. I mean, you’d have to be concentrating to even notice one turning. The original movie is a success because it takes place on an obstacle-laden highway of death. What the fuck is there to hit in the ocean? This is more of a cheap assed Die Hard Clone than anything else, one for the family with all involved shamelessly trying to cash in on the original. Dafoe might have even made a good villain, but they wasted him on this Thunder in Paradise big screen adaption.
If you ignore the two hideously shit TV sequels – Gary Busey couldn’t even save those – there’s still the problem of the first real sequel. This film is shit, it somehow takes a good concept and fucks it up. Ah, the old supercomputer goes homicidal and starts fucking shit up chestnut, the idea of choice for rent-a-scribe hacks who want to be Jim Cameron. That old turd that gets shoved into movies that already have better default concepts. Paul Anderson copied that when he raped Resident Evil. This was supposed to be Van Damme’s big comeback and the making of Michael Jai White. Forget it. It looks like bush league filler from the Sci-Fi channel with a story and talent-free direction to match. A soul-less, boring piece of shit. Van Damme is bored and offers nothing special, even with White as an opponent.
When news broke in 2007 that DHINO was going to be PG-13, Bruce Willis opted to try some damage control and sign up to AICN to assuage fans in uproar. Naturally, he was dismissed as a fake troll – untill he appeared on webcam revealing both the real actor and a worrying touch of desperation for doing so. He then said that not only would this movie be good, but, shit, it was even better than the first. Bruno, you lied. I could sit all day listing the problems of this beached whale. The director is a hackneyed kunt. Its too large – Die Hard should be relatively grounded, this just jumps all kinds of sharks. And worst of all, its softcore shit. To use a quote from The Rock (1996), I don’t like soft-assed shit, and that’s exactly what DHINO is. Bruce, you phoned it in, you took the big payday. You failed us. And the ‘harder cut’? You could show that piss on Sunday Morning Church and no-one would bat an eyelid.
This movie has a special place on the ManlyMovie shitlist. It was the first of the string of bad 00’s updates, adaptions and sequels. I was stupidly hyped for this movie. And then, when I saw it on opening day, it was like being forced to watch old people fucking. They fucked it up. Its a rehash of a rehash, only shitter. They made the Terminator camp, with horrible one-liners here, there and everywhere. The villain is shit, a pathetic attempt to combine the brutality of the original T-800 with the slickness of the T-1000. John Connor is a pussy, 10 minutes into the movie he is cornered and caged by a veterinarian. That’s supposed to be the leader of humanity? The entire movie is made up of Connor whining like a bitch and Schwarzenegger’s ill-placed humour. Cameron was right, the soup waspissed in. I can’t think of a better way to describe this failure.
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