Crash-and-burn time.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Summer movies - The Reel World - Column

IT SEEMS that, each summer movie season for the past decade or so, Hollywood expects audiences to lower their collective IQs about 20 points, not that such expectation isn't apparent the rest of the year. While viewers constantly are nudged in the ribs by media reviewers reminding them to "lighten up; it's summer!," one can't come away from hot weather films without a sense of bewilderment, even betrayal. While it is possible to find the occasional gem buried (at times so deeply as to be invisible) in a mound of sludge, the point is that the motion picture industry usually assumes every ticket buyer is a hyperactive adolescent.

This season was opened by "Maverick," another retro retread of 1950s television aimed at baby boomers, except that its cynical sensibility and endless, too-cute hijinks focused much more on twentysomethings. The real curtain-raiser for summer 1994, though, was "Speed," a Keanu Reeves movie designed to transform this relentlessly nondescript actor into an action hero. The precise vehicle for so doing is a Los Angeles bus rigged by mad bomber Dennis Hopper with explosives designed to detonate when its speed drops below 50 mph.

With a large vehicle defying the natural laws of California traffic--barreling down freeways, boulevards, and side streets; destroying everything on four wheels; smashing through guard rails; even hurtling over an unfinished gap in a road--the film is typical of what the modern, post-"French Connection" car chase is about: the wish-dream of the frustrated motorist tired of coping with the restrictions of backups and traffic regulations, yearning to turn loose all the horsepower. The payoff of "Speed," like other pictures about out-of-control motor vehicles, is not the freedom of high-speed travel, but the destruction of property. It is reminiscent of the moments on MTV's "Beavis and Butt-head" cartoon series when Beavis says to Butt-head, "Let's break something."

Explosions and conflagrations

"Speed" and films of its genre are less than adolescent in their love of smashed or exploded metal, flames, and chain-reaction conflagrations. Such fare is billed as "blockbuster" solely because its busting-up of city blocks is writ so large in 70mm, six-track Dolby surround stereo, with a hyperthyroid marketing campaign preceding it. Rollercoaster rides like "Speed" might be acceptable were it not for their insultingly unoriginal conception, the insult becoming more bold-faced with each season. Advertisers...