This is a curious movie and has the feeling of a script that was named something like “panic in the ocean” but was shoe horned into the “Speed” universe when the first movie did well enough to warrant a sequel. Sadly there’s no Keanu, but Jason Patric does a fine enough job as the new romantic partner of Sandra Bullock. Interesting enough, the guy that payed Boba Fett and all the clone troopers in the Star Wars films is here, arguably getting more screen time than anyone else.
This came out just a few months before Titanic, a fact that I had to look up because there are so many scenes that reminded me of that film, guess the lifeboats and deck drama were just obvious parts of a boat-at-sea actiondramedy.
There’s a lot of mock in the film, from the forced actions scenes (underwater line feeding was just goofy) to William Dafoe’s absolutely manic portrayal of a hacker that’s somehow flooding the insides of a boat by flooding the ballast tanks, but I appreciate what they were going for and can see this as the big dumb action film that it is, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than that.
