Flasz On Film

Imagine, it’s the mid-90s again. It’s summer. Scorching hot July. You awoke naturally thanks to the overbearing power of sunlight peering through the window in your bedroom. The house is quiet because both your parents have gone to work. There’s a little note on the kitchen table telling you what to eat for breakfast and lunch. You have eight hours to kill.  

You make your cereal, go to the living room and think of something to watch while you eat. Yesterday you watched The Terminator for the umpteenth time. Taped off TV. The same VHS tape has the live action The Flintstones with John Goodman and Rick Moranis on it. You don’t feel like watching it again. It’s too early for Predator. Maybe it’s time… Hmmm… 

You feel the need to watch Speed again. You find the VHS tape on the shelf. Plop it in. The whirring sound of the tape winding up soothes your pre-teen anxieties. 90s ASMR. It doesn’t bother you one bit that the picture quality is wonky at best because it’s not a store-bought VHS. You copied it from the tape you rented like twenty times already and you’re out of pocket money so you can no longer afford to keep renting this movie ad infinitum. It doesn’t matter. You’re only eleven. You don’t know it yet but many years later you will have all those movies on your shelf, bought and paid for with hard-earned cash, displayed proudly in their Blu-ray cases. It doesn’t matter. The world disappears when Mark Mancina’s blood-pumping theme opens the movie. Pop quiz, hot shot. It’s you, Keanu and the Wildcat. Make the turn. Make that jump. Slide under that bus. You’re on a subway. Keanu’s taller. Final kiss. Crane out. Roll credits.  

Did you take two hours to have breakfast? Yes. Yes, you did.  

The question now stirring deep inside you is if you really want to go out and play ball with your buddies. Maybe later. How many times can you watch Speed in one day?  

Four. The answer is four. You want to watch it again immediately because why not. You watch it once more with lunch. But you can’t finish because your mum comes back from work.  

What have you been doing all day? I don’t know. Stuff.  

You can’t keep watching in the living room. Dad will be back soon and he’ll kick you out. His stuff is more important than yours. Obviously. You take that tape to your bedroom and sling it into your own VHS player. It’s a hand-me-down from your dad from when he bought a new one for himself. The one you have does only SP. Dad’s does LP and SP. He can squeeze five films on a four-hour tape. But LP tapes don’t play on your bedroom VHS player. You knew that when you copied Speed. You knew this was a movie you wanted the freedom to watch in your bedroom. To be your bedtime story if you wished. 

You eject the tape right when Jeff Daniels says they got the guy and they’re on the way to Howard Payne’s house. You will watch his I’m-dead-and-I-know-it quivering expression on your little thirteen-inch tube. For now, it doesn’t matter because your chair is right up close to the screen, so it looks big and proper. Your face is so close to the screen that you can easily see the cross-hatching of those 90s pixels. Jack will have to save those people that way, all cross-hatched and stuff. Again, it doesn’t matter. It’s glorious anyway when he does it.  

Credits roll again just before your dad walks into the house. All hands on deck. Nobody cares what you’ve been up to. But somebody cares that the sofa looks like someone sat on it and it’s unacceptable. You just bear it. He’ll go for his nap soon. No Speed until then.  

It won’t be one of those days you get to watch Keanu board a bus like a badass four times. You may have to stop at three. You navigate the house of horror that is your life with a pair of frustrated adults and a young sibling. The dinner questioning. The looks. The row over a stained tablecloth. You’ll try to make it not matter later. Powering up the home PC may not be a good idea because they’ll hear you waste time. You buy time by hiding from domestic life in the four walls of the bedroom you share with your little sister. Arnie is always watching you from that Last Action Hero poster you got from the owner of your local VHS rental store. It was a good day. JCVD in Hard Target is looking at you from a different angle. Read a book. Do something. Shower. Get ready for bed. Read a book some more.  

The house quiets down eventually as the summer Sun hides behind the horizon, awash in blood of a nearly-murdered day. It’s time. The tape is still in and you made sure to rewind it before. You get out of bed, turn on your tiny TV and with volume turned down to an absolute minimum you watch Speed for the third time. Pop quiz, hot shot. Are you insured? Oh, darn. Cheap watch and enough C-4 to blow a hole in the world. Two hours pass in the bliss of 90s action. Which for you is just action.  

Today you’re no longer eleven. You’re pushing forty. You had a rough week and every day you feel the world bearing down on your shoulders with the crushing weight of responsibility for stuff and people you never knew you’d be responsible for. You wake up every morning hoping you don’t induce in your own kid the kind of anxiety you suffered when your own dad walked through the door in the afternoon. It’s tough because you feel you carry that loser gene. Hoping it’s recessive.  

On a day like this, you need a pick-me-up. You approach your wall of Blu-rays. The same wall of Blu-rays you promised yourself to get when you were a pre-teen copying tapes like a criminal. You bend down to the S-section and find it. Speed. Directed by Jan De Bont. Starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Two hours of pure adrenaline. The blurb isn’t lying. It’s all true. You’ve seen it all before. You’ve lived it. You’ve been on the bus. And now you’re itching to board it once more.  

The disc goes in. The forty inches of blackness illuminate the room. The static menu reflects in your glasses. Behind it, your smile. You know what’s coming. Tonight’s the night.  

Press play. Sit down. Your phone is in the kitchen. No distractions.  

Pop quiz, hot shot. You thought you needed another challenge or something? Poor people are crazy, Jack. I’m eccentric. 

Yeah, but I’m taller. 

You mouth lines you haven’t heard in years like a Graham Yost-written Manchurian Candidate. They come out naturally. Organically. Scarily so. 

I own this car. It’s not stolen. It is now. 

One day you will fork out a grand on a vanity plate that says TUNEMAN. This is a promise you can take to the bank.  

Two hours later. Mark Mancina’s music swells in a crescendo of violins as Jack and Annie’s relationship based on intense experiences gets off the ground knowing it is doomed to fail because you have seen Speed 2. But a smile creeps onto your face once again because you realize you’ve been holding your breath this whole time.  

Even though you know this movie by heart, you don’t mind it makes no sense in places. How does Jack get on top of the subway train? Isn’t it obvious the bus is not driving at fifty miles an hour? Thirty at best. The footage is sped up in places. That’s for sure. That jump? Impossible.  

So what? 

Movie magic. It doesn’t matter because you feel better. Decades of woes shed in one evening. Sweated out. Pushed through the pores in your skin by an outflowing rush of adrenaline excreted in a fight-or-flight response induced by one of the greatest action movies ever.  

That’s right. You heard it.  

One of the best action movies ever made. A movie you feel has been incorrectly labelled as Die Hard on a bus in an ultimate act of filmcritical injustice. Because saying so assumes Die Hard is a supreme being to which other beings are subservient. That Die Hard is the template and Speed is a derivative. It is not. You know it. You’ve known it all your life.  

Speed and Die Hard are peers. They both belong in the same pantheon of great genre movies. Of perfectly lean vehicles of drama packaged into blood-curdling rollercoaster rides. Of ultimate experiences capable of changing lives of young boys who may have been too young to see them when they watched them four times a day. Boys who turned into grown men who tear up when Rocky ends, when John McClane gives Holly that bloody kiss. When Jack and Annie are finally safe.

Speed matters to you not only because it’s a great movie that is lean, propulsive and effective. It’s a great movie because it matters to people like you. Because it connects you to a time long forgotten. When you could watch Speed, rewind it and watch it again. And you did it not because you could or because you had time on your hands. You could have watched Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark. But you chose to board the bus then. And you’re choosing to board the bus today when Speed is thirty years old. It hasn’t aged a day. And you feel as though neither have you, at least for the two hours of bliss, courtesy of Graham Yost, Jan De Bont, Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Daniels and Dennis Hopper.