Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994)

Consistently ranks alongside Predator and Die Hard as one of the greatest action movies of all time.

High concept action films like this have practically disappeared from the market (except for, say, Crank, which is effectively Speed with a person) and whilst the genre attempts to be that little bit clever and failing for its effort (if you can tell me what the fuck was happening in Transformers 2 I’ll buy you a beer) it seems to have been forgotten that, more often than not, the simple ideas are often the best: Die Hard, Predator, The Terminator, the original Taking of Pelham 123 to name a few.

Jan de Bont hasn’t made anything nearly as good since.

5/5