I sat through this movie just to be able to write a bad movie review of it. You know what? It's really not that bad. It's like calling "Timecop," "Under Siege," or "Hard Target" bad. Uh, maybe those aren't the best examples to use here. "Speed 2" almost succeeds in doing what it set out to do: make a mediocre "Die Hard" rip-off. However, with thirty minutes left to go, it suddenly swerves from being just another "Die Hard" clone to being a really stupid movie.

When I saw "Speed 2," I had two expectations. First off, there would be a scene where Sandra Bullock explains to the audience why Keanu Reeves isn't in the sequel. Ninety seconds into the movie, she does. A few minutes later, she does again. The second thing I expected was some clever witticism when the Hero sends the Villain to a gruesome death, a bon mot reflecting how the Villain was killed. Perhaps if the Villain was crushed between the ocean liner and an iceberg, the Hero would say, "Have an ice day!" As it turns out, there was nary a quip said when the Villain was killed.

As I've mentioned above, the first half to two-thirds is rather watchable. Sandra Bullock stands off to the side shouting encouraging words and acting concerned. She even has a few funny scenes, such as the one where she's holding the chainsaw in the doorway, trying to rescue some trapped people.

I don't know if I missed anything in the few minutes when I was in the kitchen finishing up dinner, but where did this Dwayne guy come in? Alex rescues him off of a lifeboat, and suddenly he's Alex's best friend. Later on, Alex commandeers a boat, and the reluctant boat owner starts acting like Alex's best friend, after Alex threatens to throw the boat owner overboard. Huh?

But despite such idiotic nonsense as having a sympathetic lost little deaf girl, an Overeaters Anonymous being forced to strip, and Alex shooting at a television wall when the villain taunts him instead of looking for where the villain actually is, the movie doesn't totally stink. That is, until they get to the harbor of the tropical island.

Cruise ship bounces off an oil tanker; everybody is ok. Something like that is to be expected in a film like this. However, we now arrive at the scene where the ocean liner sails through a crowded harbor that is filled with people who don't notice the ocean liner until it is only ten feet away. I've seen cruise ships before. They're kind of big. Some of the ones that come up here to NYC are larger than the USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier. Then the ship spends the next thirty minutes slowly crawling up a block-long dock.

Oddly enough, this sequence reminded me of "Superman 2." Remember when General Zod and the others were using their super-breath to blow the Metropolis populace down that street? There were all the comic relief bits like the guy on roller skates being blown backwards; the guy placing a call, oblivious to the fact that his phone booth had just been knocked over and is sliding away; and the guy's toupee getting blown off. "Speed 2" has a sequence just like it. There's a cute little dog that barks at the boat and bounds away just in time. There's the cute little kid trying to warn his mom of the oncoming ship. The ocean liner stops short of a really expensive car, but the car gets crushed when the stuck anchor drops on it. Oddly enough, the car shown here wasn't one of the expensive cars you normally see: it's not a BMW Z3, nor is it a Ferrari, a Porsche, nor Lamborghini. The only thing that set it up as an Expensive Car That Gets Destroyed cliché was that it was a black, shiny convertible.

A far better (bad movie-wise) action movie set on an ocean liner is "Deep Rising." Now there's a good bad movie.

Scene to watch for: The grenade in the door handle scene. A casual examination of the trap reveals that if Alex had just opened the door, the explosive wouldn't have gone off. The villain should have tied the string to the doorframe.

Best line: There's a torrential rainstorm in the middle of the night while a lifeboat filled with hapless extras is hanging at a 45-degree angle -- a rope has been thrown from the ocean liner to the lifeboat where a plucky young man is leaning out of the boat, trying to secure the rain-slicked rope to the slippery hoop on the end of the slick-surfaced lifeboat. Alex calls out: "Be careful!" Twice. Thanks, Einstein.

Things that make you say, "Huh?": Why didn't the Villain just shoot Sandra Bullock, the first officer, and Alex?

Sure sign that the movie was going to stink: Keanu Reeves turned down between six and sixteen million dollars to appear in it.