The Forgotten Action Movie Speed KILLED
Is Blown Away an underrated gem, or simply proof that modern movies don't hit the same?
In 1994, two major action movie blockbusters released in cinemas within a couple of months of each other, both with a similar theme: cops in a race against time to track down a mad bomber terrorising a city. One was Speed, a film about a bus that couldn't slow down starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and the other was Blown Away, which revolved around a vengeful ex-IRA bomber terrorising Boston, and which starred Tommy Lee Jones, Jeff Bridges, and Forest Whitaker in leading roles.
Speed was an instant classic, becoming a hit with critics and grossing over $350 million at the global box office. Today, it's fondly remembered as one of the better Die Hard riffs of the nineties, as well as the moment Reeves formally announced his action movie credentials. Blown Away, conversely, was not so fortunate, premiering just a month after Speed, falling afoul of critics for its similarly minded premise and grossing just $53 million by the time its run in theatres came to a close. As Roger Ebert put it in his review, "Blown Up [sic] is the kind of movie that people should be sentenced to see if they complain that “Speed” is implausible."
Ouch.
Blown Away - like so many other unlucky siblings that are a part of the "twin" movie fraternity - was dismissed pretty immediately for the crime of releasing next to a stronger movie with a similar premise. (And also for coming second.) But even with my bias for undervalued '90s movie comforts, it also feels like a bit of a hidden gem - a reminder of when even supposedly mediocre movies used to go so hard that they'd blow up a ship with enough explosives to shatter the windows of over 8,000 houses located in the wider Boston area. It harkens back to an era of Die Hard-adjacent goodness - of tangible, John McTiernan-inspired action - and when Tommy Lee Jones was allowed to be a freaky lil' guy (which is possibly his strongest form).
It's also just a great piece of action cinema, directed by genre journeyman Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2), shot by Peter Levy (who also collaborated with John Woo for 1996's Broken Arrow), and complemented by a quintessentially nineties soundtrack that features lashings of U2 - and also lots of Tommy Lee Jones swaying menacingly to U2. What may have seemed mediocre in 1994 stands out today as a reinvigorating piece of action cinema, one that quite fittingly blows away the tiles upon tiles of straight-to-streaming slop that meets your gaze the moment you enter the void of Netflix or Amazon Prime.
It's not "Speed" good, but it is a damn fine piece of Dad Movie cinema from a decade that contributed more to that genre than any other.
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