Not as bad as you might have thought it would be, De Bont's Speed 2 hums along nicely as a summer actioner, rarely resting on its laurels, but still somehow managing to capsize midway through, I think somewhere right around the point at which villain Dafoe begins attaching squirming little leeches to his naked torso and bugging his eyes out in a fair-to-middling impression of the late Marty Feldman. There are, of course, the overwhelming public and professional expectations placed on De Bont that have caused him to go so far off course from the streamlined, masterful nerve-wracker that was Speed, and taking that into consideration, this sequel is hardly as awful as pre-release naysayers touted it as being. Bullock, reprising her role as the disaster-prone Annie, once again manages to be simultaneously breathtaking as well as a proper movie heroine. Patric, however, as new love interest Alex -- yet another LAPD yahoo, much to Annie's chagrin -- turns stoicism into an art form here. Whereas Keanu Reeves was required to do little more than act tough and look buff in the prequel, Patric's emotional role is much larger here: He's got to do more than play Top Cop on Big Boat, and he falls considerably short of the mark. To put it lightly, for two characters so hopelessly in love with each other, Patric and Bullock are working without any visible chemistry. The plot, slim though it may be, follows the couple on a Caribbean cruise aboard the truly mammoth ocean liner, the Seabourn Legend, which, wouldn't you know it, is about to be hijacked by madman Dafoe. One of the spiffy things about Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson's screenplay is Dafoe's modus operandi: As his backstory goes, he's the designer of the Seabourn Legend's state-of-the-art navigational system, but after he contracted a rare blood disease (courtesy of all those electromagnetic doodads he's been working with over the years) he was summarily dumped by his employers and left to employ medieval medicinal methods, swill Cutty Sark, and terrorize Sandra Bullock. And you thought disgruntled postal employees were bad news. De Bont's action set-pieces can be things of rare beauty if you let yourself go willingly into their histrionic embrace; he thankfully eschews the high-gloss, Neanderthal touch of Jerry Bruckheimer and Company in favor of some truly awesome devastation. Speed 2's seemingly endless climax is a good example of this, despite the fact that it's, well, seemingly endless. Not nearly as clever at taxing the audience's knuckles as its forerunner, Speed 2 still manages to stay above board long enough to merit a look-see, if only to relish the once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of Mr. Dafoe and his pet leeches.

2.0 stars