Speed 2: Cruise Control cost three times as much as its predecessor, and it's about a third as good. Keanu Reeves, whose monotonous intensity was put to good use in the first film, has been replaced by Jason Patric, who employs the same monotone with none of the intensity. Speed's snappy premise is AWOL as well. The action this time is aboard a luxury liner that has been programmed by the villainous Willem Dafoe to smash into an oil tanker while he zips away with a fortune in jewels. He needs the money to cover medical costs that his employer refused to provide--even though the company poisoned his blood with copper before it fired him.

Did you follow all that? I almost didn't. Dafoe announces his motive over a loudspeaker, and whenever his explanation starts to sound dubious (like the whole "copper-in-the-blood" angle), returning director Jan de Bont has another character step on Dafoe's lines or fire a noisy gun.

Obfuscation is de Bont's prevailing strategy for Speed 2, and it's manifested primarily in shaky, hand-held close-ups. When Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch established the quick-cut action-film style, each of the shots was at least well-composed and comprehensible. De Bont's battalion of cameras produces sequences of shots that are blurred and usually meaningless. The images are then cut together to give the impression that the action is just too frenetic to absorb. Instead, the effect is merely exasperating, even nauseating. (I recommend focusing on the exit sign and watching the movie from the corner of your eye--although, after a few minutes, that exit sign starts to look pretty good.)

Waterlogged Jason Patric and Sandra Bullock, all wet in Speed

Frankly, Speed 2 is a cheat; it's a sequel to a title, not to a movie. Calling this mess Speed is like slapping a Coke label on a bottle of water. The only real connection the film has to its predecessor is the recurrence of ancillary actors such as Sandra Bullock, who reprises her damsel-in-distress role for a new hero. Unfortunately, Bullock--whose good-spirited anxiety seemed so real and so cute in Speed--has little to do in the sequel but stand around and beg Patric not to risk his life. And when she tries to act nonplused by the mayhem around her, she comes off sounding infantile.

Bullock's big moments are reserved for romantic scenes with Patric, during which they both spout inane dialogue in each other's general direction. It used to be that we went to big movies to watch people more urbane and more together than we could ever hope to be, but these days our screen heroes sound like figures in a first-year Spanish textbook. ("I am going to the beach. Do you have a dictionary?") This inanity stretches to Speed 2's supporting cast, a fatuous bunch of vacationers who add nothing to either the environment or the plot of the film (quite unlike the bus passengers in Speed).

Maybe screenwriters Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson put all the good stuff in their first draft--you know, stuff like action context and character motivation--and de Bont cut it out before shooting began. Chances are, though, that they all shared the same vision: to make a movie in which nothing is happening, but it's happening at a breakneck pace.