A guest on the recent Speed episode of the Bright Wall/Dark Room podcast mentioned that this essay from Veronica Fitzpatrick may be the best ever published on the site. So I checked it out, and it is indeed very good!
Becoming Bomb: Speed (1994) - Bright Wall/Dark Room
The perfection of Jan de Bont’s 'Speed' owes not to its exemplification of “classical” Hollywood narrative, but to the intensity of its enthusiasm for those norms.
brightwalldarkroom.com