Speed: Why Everyone Hates that Last Part in the Subway

June 18, 2007

In the June 22, 2007 issue of Entertainment Weekly the editors list out the top 25 action films of all time. Speed, sitting in 11th place, picks up this review:

We’re gonna go ahead and pretend that the last third of Jan De Bont’s stellar directorial debut doesn’t exist. (Remember the bit on the runaway subway? See, you’ve been pretending the same thing for years.)

Turns out there is a very good reason why that ending stinks - the Story Limit was broken. Complete stories either have a set number of options or a certain amount of time that must be exhausted before the climax can occur. This limit must be set up early on in a story and remain consistent throughout. Changing it halfway (or in this case, 2/3 of the way) only confuses an audience.

The Story Limit in Speed then must be an Optionlock, right? Get the passengers off the bus before it drops below 50 M.P.H. Simple enough.

Wrong!

As explained in an old issue of Dramtica Storyforming ((A PDF of this 1994 issue is available here.)) (emphasis added):

Early on in Speed, a timelock is firmly established. The mad bomber, Howard Payne (played by Dennis Hopper), has rigged an RTD bus with a bomb that will go off at a specific time (11:00 a.m.). On top of that, he has added additional constraints by not allowing the bus to decelerate below 50 m.p.h. and not allowing any of the passengers to leave the bus without the bomb being triggered early. Though these additional limitations appear to be an option-lock, they do not fit the bill because they only limit the actions of the characters within the story, not the scope of the story itself. If we removed the timelock, the bus could run around in circles forever as long as food and gas were replenished. If we removed the speed and passenger options, however, the bus would still blow up once the time was up. […] Before the time is up, clever Jack Traven, played by Keanu Reeves, gets everybody off of the bus. The bus then drops below the 50 m.p.h. limit and blows up. The passengers are saved! End of story, right? No, that pesky bomber is still hanging around. How much time is there remaining? Suddenly the time element becomes irrelevant – good-bye timelock. Ouch. Now the story has changed to an optionlock without any clear options established. The audience is unsure of the limit once the timelock has been ignored and we find ourselves with two endings. Double-Ouch!

That’s why that ending on the subway feels so lame. The audience expects the story to be over. The limit was reached. What happens when you don’t follow through on someone’s expectations? You break their trust. And there is nothing more despicable in movie-making than breaking an audience’s trust. Nothing. An audience may forgive, but they’ll never forget (as evidenced in the Entertainment Weekly article).

But you know, it’s one thing to complain about a story and point out its faults. Anybody can do that. It’s quite another thing to actually provide some constructive criticism on what can be done about it:

Quick solution: since Jack gets off the bus anyway, move the material that currently happens after the bus goes boom (including the subway sequence) to before the boom. Other than a few logistical issues which could easily be addressed, the story would flow better and the original limit would behave as promised. Jack’s partner, in lieu of being blown up at Hopper’s home, could replace the “maiden in distress” on the subway. That way Jack, even after Hopper’s premature demise astride the subway, must return to the bus and save the day before the time runs out.

The purpose of Speed was obviously to entertain. The authors weren’t after Best Screenplay. But they did violate the audience’s trust by breaking the Story Limit. If they had only followed through on the story they set up, who knows, they might’ve made it into the top 10.