TV - Movies
Why Keanu
Reeves Didn't
Return For
Speed 2
By MIKE FLOORWALKER
The first sign that something was amiss with the sequel “Speed 2: Cruise Control” was its lack of Keanu Reeves. Instead, Sandra Bullock’s Annie was promoted to lead, and she found herself aboard another vehicle that couldn't slow down (this time, a luxury yacht), with a new boyfriend (Jason Patric) and the great Willem Dafoe as the villain.
As it turns out, Reeves took one look at the sequel's script, and that was all it took for him to get as far away from the project as possible. The actor said, "It was about a cruise ship, and I was thinking, 'a bus, a cruise ship ... a cruise ship is even slower than a bus,’ and I was like, 'I love you guys, but I just can't do it.'"
Plenty of people who worked on the film didn’t think highly of it either, with Jason Patric calling it “an innocuous, boring movie,” and director Jan De Bont saying, “There's a lot of movies made that should never have been made.” Reeves would continue his upward trajectory with 1999’s “The Matrix,” but Fox refused to work with him for quite a while when he turned down “Speed 2.”