All the cops are packing it up, high-tenning, and getting ready to go, but Keanu’s like, “Hold on.” Keanu has the best ’stincts in LA, and he has a feeling Hopper is still in the buil’. He and Jeff go to check it out.
They find Hopper hiding in the freight elevator with a bomb, and not only does he take Jeff hostage, he’s also like, “POP QUIZ, HOT SHOT,” which is so rude because pop quiz is, like, their thing. Hopper tells hot shot that he wants $3 million or else. Keanu shoots Jeff in the leg to “take him out of the equation,” and I’m not sure exactly how that helps because Jeff is still a) alive, b) a hostage, and c) in Dennis Hopper’s arms except now he can’t walk, but I didn’t go to Bomb Sexpert Elevator Academy, so what do I know?
Regardless, it works. Hopper kind of waddles backward into the parking garage going, “Hahahahahahaha!” and then explodes. OR DOES HE?
Jeff Daniels is one of those guys that seems fat, but then he’s not.
Keanu and Jeff receive police medals in some sort of televised police medal ceremony—yes, very common, we’ve all watched them. And you know who else is watching? Dennis Hopper! Totally alive at his house! Turns out he did not blow up, and he’s really mad.
The next morning, Keanu goes to his local coffee shop and says hey to his favorite bus driver, and…did buses really look that antique in 1994????? Am I…old? If you asked me to date that bus I’d be like, “Sure, as long as it’s not a SAGITTARIUS”—HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—no, I’d be like, “Uh, 1963?” but apparently that is a full-on 1990s bus like I rode to the bead store before piano lessons every Tuesday.
Does anyone else feel like everything was 1970 until 2008 and then it abruptly switched to 2015 until 2017 when it became 2020 and has been ever since?
Half a block away, the bus absolutely explodes! Keanu runs over and discovers a pay phone ringing next to the burning dead bus. He answers it and, pop quiz, hot shot, it’s DENNIS. That was always happening in the ’90s—a pay phone ringing and on the other end is a psychopath who’s about to explain the plot. There’s nothing as creepy as that and now we can’t do that anymore because pay phones were canceled! I hate the 2000s!
Dennis informs Keanu that he’s actually put another bomb on another bus, and now he wants $3.7 million: “It’s my nest egg, Jack. At my age, you have to plan ahead.” (Bro, you’re old! Didn’t you already miss “ahead”?)
Spoiler alert, but I need to skip forward and address something. They figure out eventually that the reason Dennis Hopper made this extremely overcomplicated weird bus bomb is because he used to be a police bomb sexpert supercop just like Keanu. Unfortunately, his hand got fucked up in the line of duty, and now he’s mad that his pension isn’t luxurious enough. Can you imagine that story line being presented as a comprehensible motivation for terrorism in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty????? Hahahahaha! To a kid born in, say, 2001 that’s like a fish threatening to blow up the ocean because he’s thirsty. You’re an already-comfortable yet inexplicably enraged middle-aged white guy in 1994 with a government pension who’s prepared to kill a bunch of working-class people on public transit so you can squeeze millions of dollars of fun-money out of the US taxpayer coffers because you want it? LOL. Is Speed an allegory for the twenty-first-century GOP????? I hope so because at the end Dennis Hopper is decapitated to death by a subway lamp! (My hope is allegorical, of course!!!)
Dennis tells Keanu that there’s a bomb on a bus, and it’s rigged so that the bomb will arm when the bus goes above fifty miles per hour, and then it will explode if the bus dips back below fifty miles per hour. I feel like the one thing thrillers never take into account is that in real life all people are very, very lazy and no one would ever do this.
Keanu figures out which bus it is and starts chasing the bus. He has to stop it before it goes over fifty miles per hour! There is a joke about LA traffic that I could make here but I will not!
When the bus passengers notice Keanu chasing them, they say things like, “He really wants to get on this bus!” and “That man sure has a hard-on for this bus.” They don’t understand that he just has a hard-on for saving their dang lives! Also porno.
Keanu spies a random cool guy driving a speedy convertible with a vanity plate that says “TUNEMAN,” and decides it’s just what he needs for chasing down this bus. Keanu steals TUNEMAN’s convertible, and in the process he also steals TUNEMAN! TUNEMAN is more exasperated than terrified, even though he is nearly liquefied many times by Keanu’s gonzo driving styles. That’s probably because this whole carjacking thing is making TUNEMAN late to either creating or listening to TUNES (it’s never specified). “I gotta get on that bus,” Keanu explains. “Yeah, yeah, you get on that bus.”—TUNEMAN, over it.
TUNEMAN has a car phone, so Keanu is able to alert the cops about the return of Dennis and his pointlessly baroque speed-based bus bomb. He has TUNEMAN take the wheel, and then he leaps on to the bus! Then TUNEMAN crashes, but that’s not Keanu’s problem.
The bus passengers are reasonably freaked, so Keanu explains that he’s a cop. A small-time criminal, assuming Keanu is there to arrest him, pulls out a gun! Coincidentally, then Keanu tells him exactly the thing I say to myself every
