“There’s a bomb on a bus”: ‘Speed’ turns 30

Pop quiz, hot shot: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, a runaway bus, and a killer high concept combined to create one of the best action movies of the ‘90s.

Why is Speed, which arrived 30 years ago this week, one of the more exciting and enduring action movies of the 1990s? 

It featured Keanu Reeves — an actor on whom the jury was still out at the time — in the sort of authoritative action performance that he’s still regularly delivering three decades later. It found a theretofore underappreciated performer, Sandra Bullock, and gave her a star-making role; both Reeves and Bullock were launched into A-list careers that have continued all these years later. It had Dennis Hopper, a man Hollywood had discarded multiple times, in one of his best turns as a psycho villain. 

But beyond all that, Speed had a killer high concept that it sold the hell out of for two straight hours.