Die Hard on wheels, Under Siege on land, Passenger 57 on the ground. It must have been an easy "pitch," belt-high fastball, down the middle of the plate, "hit" written all over it. The twenty-minute prelude is actually pretty gripping. In fact the opening credits sequence alone is gripping: a long, slow elevator descent through an almost abstract crosshatch of girders, tube lights, perfect horizontals and verticals, with the credits slanted into the space at about a thirty-degree angle. This sets the scene for a SWAT team's attempted rescue of a crowded elevator suspended at the mercy of a remote-control bomber cum extortionist. But what would seem impossibly grandiose in any old-style action film is here just a light appetizer. The movie barely takes time to catch its breath before it boards a city bus armed with an explosive device set to be activated as soon as the vehicle exceeds fifty miles per hour, and detonated as soon as it falls below fifty again. The bus situation gets spun out for roughly an hour, roughly three times as long as the elevator crisis. And at that length the interest is hard to sustain, the illusion even harder: the speedometer needle is shown to be hovering just above fifty when the bus begins scraping along a row of stationary cars, colliding flush with another car, and, if that were not enough, looking to the naked eye to be travelling more like thirty. The complications are self-refuting: overlarge, overabundant, unconnected, disengaging. And the ones aboard, under, and around the bus are not even the last of them. After those, it's on to a runaway subway train with a dead man at the throttle -- but enough; more than enough; much too much. Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Sandra Bullock; directed by Jan De Bont. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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