Keanu Reeves' Speed Was Inspired By This High-Stakes '70s Thriller You Didn't Know Existed

Although people often joke that the 1994 thriller "Speed" is just "Die Hard" on a bus, it's more fair to say the movie is just "The Bullet Train" on a bus. No, I'm not talking about the Brad Pitt-led "Bullet Train" movie that came out in 2022, but about the 1975 Japanese thriller.

"The Bullet Train," or "Shinkansen daibakuha," was a movie about a group of criminals who plant a bomb on a high-speed train, and tell the authorities that the train can't go below 80 kilometers per hour or else the bomb will go off. Although the movie isn't particularly well-known in the United States, it was well-received in Japan and even got itself a sequel in 2025. This movie was called "Bullet Train Explosion," and it was released straight to Netflix.

So does this mean we should call the plagiarism police on "Speed" screenwriter Graham Yost? Definitely not. Yost has been open about his source of inspiration for the movie; he'd heard from his father about the plots of both "The Bullet Train" and the 1985 action thriller "Runaway Train." The latter film was an American movie where the brakes of a giant train are broken and the heroes have to figure out how to stop it before it crashes into a giant chemical plant. 

Yost heard the concept of a train not being allowed to stop, and asked himself the logical question of: "Wouldn't this be better on a bus?" Bullet trains are grade-separated, after all. While trying to keep a train above a certain speed is hard, it's still easier (and less cinematic) than trying to keep a bus over a certain speed. A bus has to deal with traffic lights, roundabouts, other cars, and so on... If your goal is to stress your viewers out, the bus is a better vehicle for this sort of premise. 

Although "Speed" was a bigger hit in America than the 1975 "Bullet Train" was in Japan, the decision to set the story on a bus was not without its downsides. "Speed" was forced to throw realism out the window, not just with the lack of rush hour traffic in Los Angeles but with the way Annie (Sandra Bullock) and Jack (Keanu Reeves) handle certain obstacles. Most infamous is the scene where the bus has to jump the gap in an unfinished section of the highway. As an adult who understands that this is not supposed to be a hyper-realistic film, I can appreciate this silly scene for the mindless fun it is, but you better believe that 10-year-old me was fuming at the nonsense. I still want to know why the front wheels lifted up like that. "Bullet Train" may not have been as exciting as "Speed," but it also didn't have any sequence quite as immersion-breaking as that one. 

Nitpicks aside, "Speed" is still impressive in how much the bus setting improves the story. The fact that the bus needs a constantly alert driver (whereas the bullet train would stay on the tracks indefinitely) added a ton of extra tension. Critics couldn't talk enough about the chemistry between Jack and Annie, but that chemistry wouldn't have worked at all if Annie were a passenger on a train. She likely wouldn't have been able to step up in that situation, let alone have been required to. 

As much as everyone loves a good train movie, and as much as trains may be considered one of the best settings for an action sequence, sometimes all a filmmaker needs is a bus to get the job done.