Episode 37 — Speed 2: Cruise Control

[admin 330]

Are you listening to this podcast on a computer? If so, you could be a villain in Speed 2! In this epic summer sequel we lament the absence of Keanu, marvel at the lack of deaths when a cruise ship levels a community, and wonder why computer genius Willem Dafoe has a gun if he never uses it. Do you have a bad summer movie you think we should cover? Post your suggestions on the HDTGM Facebook page or in the appropriate forum!

[sorrykansas.com 77]

Give Paul a break Scott. Especially since you said Jeff Bridges instead of Jeff Daniels.

[TimThompson 22]

[Lukas Holmes 2287]

Spectacular episode.

[mattman92ish 823]

I was waiting for scott to say MY WYYYFE cant believe it took till 39 minutes haha great ep

[A Alexander 19]

Thank you Scott Aukerman for your comment about how the 1st 5 minutes of Alien3 invalidates the entire Aliens movie. This has been my longstanding belief and it is nice to finally hear someone else say it. Oh, and loved the rest of the podcast too!

[gibbering ape-faced moron 1]

Scott was an excellent guest, he really fit in. I think this episode ranks among my favorites.

[Podus 108]

Kudos for shoehorning in anothe My wiife!

[jesle 13]

Hilarious as always! Just to add to the whole "no chemistry" thing between the leads, check out these photos from the premiere. Looks pretty awkward.

[PlanBFromOuterSpace 3138]

Does anyone else remember Pepsi Blue? I swear I'm the only person that ever bought it, and it was fucking delicious.

 

I wasn't as upset about "Alien 3" invalidating "Aliens" as I was about "Iron Eagle 2" playing the same trick. The first film is a light action flick about an Air Force brat (Jason Gedrick) that has to steal a jet with the help of Lou Gossett Jr. (who was probably too old for this shit) and his high school buds, so that he can rescue his dad, who's been shot down behind enemy lines. He manages to take on the entire military of some Middle Eastern nation or another before saving the day, and then he's shot out of the sky in the opening moments of the sequel. Bummer, dude.

 

I've got no problem with the characters saying what they're signing anyway, as not everyone in the scene knew sign language. It's when people say something in a foreign language in a movie to other people that speak that language and then immediately repeat it in English that bugs me.

 

Wasn't there also a 7-11 in "Thor" or something, in this town at the ass-end of nowhere where you'd never expect to see one?

 

I wouldn't say that time is elastic in this movie. It's more like a mobius strip, an unending series of events that keeps repeating itself into infinity, which is about how long it took me to watch this film. I remember picking it up for a few bucks used at Blockbuster shortly after it came out, and I tried and tried to get through it, but I don't think I could stay focused on it for more than a few minutes at a time, and I pretty much ended up having to "Clockwork Orange" myself into watching it. I was huge fan of the first one, and had heard about it for months and months before it came out, because my dad was in charge of the people working on the highway during the filming of most of the bus stuff. Watching "Speed" with him is like watching it with a commentary track that you can't turn off.

 

Ebert gave the movie a positive review, and his partner was taken from him a year and a half later. Karma, man. Karma...

 

I think this was one of the ONLY big summer movies that I didn't see in theaters in 1997. I had just been stationed at Beale AFB in California at the end of May, and I didn't know anyone yet, so ALL I did was go to the movies in my free time. Not sure what I was doing that weekend, but "Batman & Robin" came out the next week, and you could bet your ass that I was there opening day. "Con Air" and "Face/Off" came out that month too. Wow, some of the best and worst action movies of the year all came out within weeks of each other. As a matter of fact, you could do an entire summer's worth of shows based on the summer of 1997. I see Con Air, Speed 2, Batman & Robin, Face/Off, Air Force One, SPAWN, Conspiracy Theory (which seems more and more like a Mel Gibson documentary with every day that passes...), G.I. Jane, and STEEL. Good/bad/great summer!

 

Of all the big-budget, overlong films about boats sinking that Fox put out that year, this is EASILY the second best one.

[Julia 477]

The whole leeches element was so confusing! It almost made me want to watch the movie to understand it... almost...

[Wien 401]

You could have done an entire show over this scene alone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrEAOjLoR6Q

 

Did the black guy really say "This is not a dream!"????

 

And why does that lunatic keep talking about how fast the boat is going after its already crashed ashore?

[MasterCob 14]

I hope Aukerman says, "my wife" in every podcast he's on this week.

[AlexGabor 53]

the guy on the date who Jason Patric takes on the boat chase is in the first one. Keanu "borrows" his car to catch up to the bus or something. I am imagining he was living in whatever tropical location they were in to get away from the LAPD while living on his settlement from the city. hence the "this is not my dream!!!"

[Shannon 2953]

I really thought someone would say something about the FIRST SHOT of this awful movie

 

Not Keanu's motorcycle descends from the sky like a jet landing and it looks SO RIDICULOUS! I shouted "What?!? This movie has been on for 7 seconds and it's already unbelievable!"

 

 

This was a wonderful episode, it lessened a little of the regret I had from sitting through all 121 minutes of this movie and spending $1.50 to do it

[Finnias_J 43]

Hey, I sponsored the show this week! Just got my certificate in the mail yesterday, signed by the crews from Professor Blastoff, Who Charted, and some of HDTGM including future guest Danny Trejo. Thanks for the shout-out and all the great programming.

 

— David Finn

[TimThompson 22]

I really thought someone would say something about the FIRST SHOT of this awful movie

 

Not Keanu's motorcycle descends from the sky like a jet landing and it looks SO RIDICULOUS! I shouted "What?!? This movie has been on for 7 seconds and it's already unbelievable!"

 

 

This was a wonderful episode, it lessened a little of the regret I had from sitting through all 121 minutes of this movie and spending $1.50 to do it

 

I caught that too...terrible. Reminded me of the start of 'Cool As Ice'. Both are at the start of the movie, there must be a bad movie directors workshop on that scene.

[JacobCrites 4977]

Amazing episode. TOP FIVE! FAST FIVE? HIGH FIVE!

 

 

 

 

 

...Anyway, I was truly baffled by Willhelm Dafoe's motivation in this movie. Maybe I'm alone in this, but at the beginning of this thing, I thought the whole point of his take-over of this ship was so that he could, essentially, go on a suicide mission and get revenge against those who fired him. He was so bitter about getting fired, and he kept on going on about his under-appreciated intellect...and yet, no. Nope. The dude just wanted some diamonds. And of course, to spend some more times with his buddies, the leeches. The gang missed the best line of the movie, in my opinion: "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours," HE SAID TO THE LEACHES.

 

The craziest thing about that ending "crash" sequence was that there was all this tension built around, "Oh no! They can't crash into that oil-tanker! It'll explode and everyone in it will die!" But then at the end, the THING FRIGGIN' EXPLODES! "But all those people died!" you say? Well you're wrong, because before Vilhelm Dafoe crashed into the antennae of the tanker, all the dudes in the tanker got in lifeboats and evacuated. WHY DIDN'T THEY DO THAT TEN MINUTES AGO WHEN THE HUGE CRUISE LINER WAS...ugh. This movie.

 

THIS MOVIE! THE NERVE OF THIS MOVIE to introduce a sympathy dog in the last ten minutes of the movie! The audacity! How are the stakes not high enough? A cruise ship full of characters that we've gotten to know over the past HOUR AND FIFTY MINUTES is about to crash into a highly populated town! The bad guy, William I think his name is, has captured the leading lady! Things are happening! But nope, we don't care enough, and so the movie has to resort to threaten a poor puppies life for cheap tension.

 

Oh man...I hated this movie.

 

You know what really irritated me, though? The fact that that blind girl got rescued in the first ten minutes of Billiam taking over the ship! That was insane. I thought the fact that a poor deaf girl was trapped in an elevator and this actiony dude has to save her was going to be like, the movie. But it totally isn't. And good thing, too. Otherwise, how would we have gotten that tension-filled "slowly lowering a rope into a propeller scene." Yay?

[Scooby Donkers 1514]

Wait so on the official HDTGM rating scale, this is a "Watch It," right? What is that, like 3 1/2 Buseys?

[action52 554]

Thank you Scott Aukerman for your comment about how the 1st 5 minutes of Alien3 invalidates the entire Aliens movie. This has been my longstanding belief and it is nice to finally hear someone else say it. Oh, and loved the rest of the podcast too!

 

This was a sarcastic comment, right? I mean, pretty much everyone who hates the movie (i.e. the majority of people who saw it) complains about this when they mention why it's bad. I actually haven't seen it, but it's one of the most common complaints I hear just from people talking about the movie.

[MotorboatJones 41]

You could have done an entire show over this scene alone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrEAOjLoR6Q

 

Did the black guy really say "This is not a dream!"????

 

And why does that lunatic keep talking about how fast the boat is going after its already crashed ashore?

Wow. That's terrible. The element of suspense feels like it has been completely removed and the bits intended to be comedic are ham-fisted and out of place.

 

Also, are we expected to believe that the mother checking out the room with her son didn't hear any of the chaos and destruction outside until the ship was right outside her window?

[jeffdacock 64]

My favorite line is from one of the crew, when Dafoe stops the first engine and everyone on the bridge is running around he says "Take a look at these monitors!" and stares at them like he is seeing them for the first time.

[Wien 401]

Wow. That's terrible. The element of suspense feels like it has been completely removed and the bits intended to be comedic are ham-fisted and out of place.

 

Also, are we expected to believe that the mother checking out the room with her son didn't hear any of the chaos and destruction outside until the ship was right outside her window?

 

There is just too much in this scene....

 

Why are the people on the boat panicking? They are in a great position, they're on top of a massive boat. They aren't going to get hurt, and its not like they're going to sink into the sea. I especially like the girl that double takes her line... "We're not gunna stop! We're not gunna stop!!!"

 

"Where's the horn?!? Where's the horn!?" "There's gotta be a horn around here somewhere!"

 

So the black guy warns the people in the boats with the PA..... but he doesn't warn the people on the pier?? Fuck em, I guess they'll figure it out for themselves.

 

The guy that's trying to steer the ship with the fake wheel. "It doesn't work!" ... but the fucked up thing is that he's steering the wheel like he's trying to stay on course. If he thought the wheel worked, shouldn't he have been spinning it one direction or the other OUT of the way of the coast? Was he TRYING to steer it towards people??

 

If hitting a rinky dink boat was enough to slow the boat down enough to register on the speed gauge thingy, then how the hell did the ship have the momentum to crash as deep inland as it did?? If a small fishersham's boat slowed it down, the immediate coast and docks surely should have stopped it... right?

 

Why was their a scene where a motorboar crashes into a store??? Its so unnessesary and amounts to nothing, isn't it enough that there will SOON be a scene where a GIANT FUCKING CARNIVAL CRUISE SHIP crashes right into the middle of the town square??

 

As the boat looms towards the pier... "Quick! Pedal faster!!" Wtf, you can SWIM faster than you can pedal those damn things.

 

Lady on the phone: "What? I can't hear you??" Maybe thats because THERE IS A FUCKING CARNIVAL CRUISE SHIP CAREENING DOWN THE STREET NOT MORE THAN 10 FT BEHIND YOU.

 

Was the guy in the truck really honking his horn at the ship?? Because he clearly SEES the ship, he KEEPS driving, he doesn't hit the brakes... and he still honks and then drives right into the path.

 

The ship clearly kills the man in the truck that decided that driving in the direction that everyone was running from in a panic was a good idea, and the immediate cut after is that that madman screaming "FOUR KNOTS!!!" like keeping track of the boats speed even matters to anyone at this stage. Hundreds are dead and a town lies in ruins.

 

Where the hell did the mom and child go to escape the danger??? Was the condo she was checking out really that much larger than the width of a cruise ship?? I mean that ship LEVELED that entire place... that woman and child are dead.

 

The old couple still just relaxing on the patio until the VERY moment the ship crashed through the other side of the building... THEN they panic and run. Its like nobody in this fucking film reacts to anything until its right up on them. Its like in a videogame, where there is a certain distance you can stand from an enemy and they SHOULD be able to see you and attack, but they don't... but if you inch one step closer then they freak out and attack you. This movie is populated with dumb A.I.

 

"TWO KNOTS!" says the maniac on the floor, who is still commited to this thing for some reason.

 

The ship moves at a constant and steady pace, leveling everything and showing no visable signs of slowing down until the exact very end, where it stops like someone hit the brakes....

 

... but at least the ship spared the church, and thats all that really matters right?

[IMAHUGEHDTGMFAN 1837]

... but at least the ship spared the church, and thats all that really matters right?

 

Also don't forget that the puppy got spared as well, so all its good with the world

[Ghost of HST 71]

Yeah, that finale needed some Benny Hill music...You guys really nailed all the WTFery of this flick...Loved the post above on the villain's bizarre motives. He's going to die soon so he needs millions in diamonds? They showed that he had a ton of vitamins/drugs so he had enough money, or managed to stay on insurance, to take care of himself...I dunno, are leeches expensive?