20th Century Fox Howard Payne, the disgruntled mad bomber Dennis Hopper plays with a bug-eyed, Frank Boothian relish in the 1994 action thriller Speed , riddles his cop rival with a pop quiz: “Do you know what a bomb is, Jack, that doesn’t explode?” Alfred Hitchcock had an answer to that. Surprise, the master famously said, was a bomb under a table exploding. But a bomb under a table that doesn’t explode? Now that was the true essence of suspense.
Several bombs do explode in Speed . The most spectacular of them takes out a whole jetliner in an enormous fireball — an all-timer of Hollywood pyrotechnics work that puts just about any digitally achieved detonation to shame. (Three decades later, flames created on a computer don’t yet crackle or bloom or dance like the real thing.
) But Jan de Bont’s superlative popcorn nail-bitter still plays like a feature-length illustration of Hitchcock’s principle of suspense. Because for most of its brisk runtime, what we’re watching is a bomb that might explode, that could explode, but that hasn’t yet exploded. And that’s as exciting as any panorama of mayhem, the kind common to blockbusters of the era.
Keanu and Sandra Bullock in Speed 20th Century Fox Speed , which turns 30 today, arrived during a true arms race for Hollywood action cinema — a time when the explosions, the steroidal stars, and the budgets just kept getting bigger and bigger. It opened about a month before True Lies , the first movie ever to cost $10.
