‘Speed’ at 30: How Keanu Reeves Sped Past Bruce Willis To Become The Perfect Action Hero For the ‘90s (And Beyond)

Speed is the rare ripoff that became, for at least some time, more beloved than what it was ripping off. When it arrived in theaters 30 years ago, Jan de Bont’s action movie was referred to, quite reasonably, as “Die Hard on a bus.” It was the ’90s, Die Hard and Die Hard 2: Die Harder were both big, recent hits pitting a lone regular-guy cop (Bruce Willis) against fiendish terrorists in a relatively limited location: first an office tower, then, somewhat less compactly, an airport. Perhaps sensing that Willis would not exclusively play John McClane for the rest of his days, and excited about a high concept that couldn’t exactly be copyrighted, studios and filmmakers simply could not stop thinking of places to put their own Die Hards. So throughout the decade and beyond, we got Die Hard on a boat (Under Siege), Die Hard on a plane (Passenger 57), Die Hard on a different kind of plane (Air Force One), and, later, Die Hard in a mall (Paul Blart: Mall Cop), and Die Hard in the White House, for two non-consecutive terms (White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen).

Of course, a major difference between those Die Hard-on-a movies and the genuine article is that the lone cop (or de facto cop) typically couldn’t affect a Bruce Willis level of underdog schmoeness (neither could Willis, really, especially be the later-period sequels). Whatever their later-career travails, guys like Steven Seagal and Wesley Snipes didn’t read as just plain folks in 1992. They were badasses waiting for their moment. This shift makes Speed a particularly notable riff on the Die Hard formula. On paper – the screenplay credited to Graham Yost, with an uncredited dialogue rewrite from Joss Whedon – Jack Traven is a classic Movie Cop, athletic and quick-thinking, bantering with his partner Harry (Jeff Daniels), heedlessly jumping onto a speeding bus rigged to explode if it dips under fifty miles per hour. (John McClane would do all of that stuff in the first Die Hard, but he’d bleed and curse a lot more about it.) When this bomb-on-a-bus premise is combined with Jack’s bullet-like sleekness, it gives Speed endless, almost parodic forward momentum that hurtles out of the Die Hard zone.

This was not the first time Keanu Reeves went into action-hero mode. Three years earlier, Reeves was front and center as an aggressive cop in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break. Revelatory and beloved as that movie was, though, it had a certain compatibility with the image of Reeves as a beautiful goofbro; it centered on him going undercover as a California surfer, after all. Speed’s Jack Traven doesn’t harbor the kind of inner conflict that fuels Bigelow’s movie. He’s an unflagging machine – perfect for the Reeves rep as a guy whose acting style equates stiffness with seriousness. Certainly his line reading of a wowed “fuck me!” or a grim “I’m gonna rip your fucking spine out, I swear to God” conforms to that image.

And in terms of Reeves as a more physicalized action hero, minimalist yet perfectly expressive, the Matrix and John Wick series make better use of his particular persona. But while Speed’s status as a ’90s action classic may be owed more to its crisp writing, breathless pacing, and well-calibrated direction – saying it’s as good as Die Hard might sound like a hot take after decades of love building for the latter, but back in 1994 this was practically conventional wisdom – it’s also possible those later Reeves action movies wouldn’t exist without the rebrand it facilitated.

Jack Traven’s main trait, as depicted by the movie and described by plenty of onlookers throughout, particularly his love interest Annie (Sandra Bullock), is his “crazy” relentlessness. He doesn’t present as a wild-eyed Mel Gibson type, self-torturing until it becomes a bizarre prank, or a muscled-up ’80s-style action hero who breaks from glowering just long enough to issue a pithy wisecrack. Like the movie itself, Reeves could be classified as pure, raw function, if not for his also-beautiful form. In a way, he pre-visions the unstoppable blankness of Ethan Hunt or Jason Bourne, guys with strategic minds that sometimes seem to border on robot brain. (Ethan Hunt’s later-period Mission: Impossible adventures so fervently push back against this automaton impression that it feels like he’s protesting too much.) In this form, Reeves is almost more Agent Smith than Neo.

Yet at the same time, there are glimmers of the Keanu we’ve come to know and love since then. Yes, plenty of people loved Reeves at the outset of Speed. (I mean, look at him.) But his true action cred has been a slow build, an audience acclimation to his unusual, striking strengths as an actor. Speed doesn’t always play to these, but they emerge anyway. For example, there’s something endearing about the sight of Reeves, at one point around the halfway mark of Speed, fully having an urgent but not especially intense conversation whilst hanging on to the outside of a speeding car. You might expect it to look like an expression of surfer-dude chillness, but it’s more sweetly alien than that – he doesn’t give off the sense that he does this all the time, but he also doesn’t seem especially bothered by it. A little later, he even lets out a John Wick-style “yeah,” which to my mind has supplanted “whoa” as his signature minimalist catchphrase.

Despite his agile mind and body, Jack Traven is quicker to anger than most other Reeves action heroes; part of what’s so great about Wick is how his simmering, vengeful rage is most often unleashed in his fights and gunplay, at once workmanlike and balletic. Jack, meanwhile, does some howl-with-rage emoting a few times, especially in the back half of the picture. (Who can blame him? Mad bombers are frustrating.) These aren’t Reeves’ finest moments as an actor, yet he’s not so grim that it feels entirely performative, either. It’s more like the machinery is running low on fuel.

The Reeves machine, synchronized with peak Jan de Bont, worked: Speed was a big summer hit. Technically, it was actually a bigger hit in North America than any Die Hard movie. (Live Free or Die Hard made a little more 13 years later, but with inflation into account, Speed still triumphs.) Die Hard could still lay claim to changing its star’s career to a greater degree, but consider that while Willis went on to a terrific career with at least a dozen great performances, he never made as good an action movie as Die Hard. The future installments drifted John McClane closer to the later-period Willis persona that Die Hard allowed him to develop. Reeves, though, didn’t peak with Speed, good as the movie is. Though his later action parts would have, by turns, greater economy, more everyman appeal, and even an occasional embrace of stillness, his career took a cue from Jack Traven. It kept on running.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.