One of my favorite action movies by someone other than Mel Gibson has got to be the original “Speed.” The movie had a great cast: Keanu Reeves – gorgeous, intense, the clean cut, cop-type everyone loves to love Dennis Hopper – one of the best bad guys EVER – Sandra Bullock – America’s darling – Jeff Daniels – Imaginative casting – from slapstick to a cop – and it worked! Can you believe it has been 19 years since that movie came out? IT was released in 1994. Now that certainly makes me feel so OLD!
One of the worst sequels of all time, Speed 2 was made with a lot of the same people, with the noticeable absence of Keanu Reeves, and released in 1997. It was a box office failure – and rightfully so. The movie was a money grab and had so many technical inconsistencies that it was neither believable nor entertaining. The set for the huge crash ending was supposed to be the Caribbean town of St. Martin, but according to Wikipedia, there is no town by the name in the movie and there is not town that looks anything like the scene in the movie. So I stand by my original comment that the Isla Moin Marina in Costa Rica was used as the basis of the movie set in Speed 2. Unless this town did not exist in 1996, in which case I wonder if the architect was inspired by the movie?