Premium Rush

I was pleasantly surprised this weekend by Premium Rush. Out of all the films playing right now, that I haven't already seen, it seemed like it would be the most... film-y? Action-y? We picked this one because it wasn't getting awful reviews and sounded at least moderately entertaining.



Trailer Action: First time I've seen a trailer for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's next film, Looper, in which he plays a time-traveling assassin who has to assassinate his future self, played by Bruce Willis. This looks like a good twist on the time-travel genre and I'm actually pretty excited about this one. I've completely forgotten all of the other trailers, so they did a good job making that one stick, though I did hear about the film on NPR yesterday, so I may just be flashing back to that.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee (pronounced like the Looney Tunes villain), a bicycle-messenger in New York City. The rest of the cast is not anyone you've ever heard of (or at least I've ever heard of). Wilee picks up an envelope setting in motion a corrupt police detective and spends the rest of the film being chased down by various factions. Your pretty standard chase film, except the main characters are on bicycles and the bad guy is the only one with a car.

This plays into my deep-seated fear of being hit by a car while on my bicycle, or, why I don't generally ride my bike on roads. Especially not busy ones. It can be extremely dangerous and leads me to one of the most unbelievable parts of the film... Gordon-Levitt's character is hit by a car (not giving anything away here, they show this at the beginning of the film before a series of flashbacks) and flips slow-motion Matrix-style yet still manages to have another entire action sequence with several cracked ribs. Though he plays injured, I didn't find that convincing at all. If you get hit by a car on your bicycle, you're going to the hospital. Period.

I'll admit, I didn't go into to this one with very high expectations. It was getting 70+% fresh ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, which is generally a good sign, but not always. I think they have about the same expectations for action movies that I do—plenty of action and not all that much plot. For a late-summer action flick, it was pretty good. It's not going to win any awards (unless something extremely weird happens, it's always a possibility), but it wasn't entirely predictable and had enough good action to make it a refreshing surprise in the post-summer blockbuster season.

Post-summer you say? Let me just take a moment to explain how the film industry views release dates. Summer, being defined here as late April/early May (it seems to get earlier every year) through the end of July or so, is reserved for the big-action, "popcorn-flick" type films, your Avengers and your Batman's and such. Between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, they release some of those types of films, anything they think will be up for Oscars and family-friendly movies. The rest of the year, January-April and the months of August, September and October, studios release films that they don't think will draw such large audiences. I'm not exactly sure why this is, but I suspect it's because they KNOW they can make more money on films people want to see by releasing them at a time when more people can go to see them. Kids are off from school and people take vacations during the summer and winter breaks, so maybe they have more time to go to the movies. And end rant.

Anyway, Premium Rush was actually not a bad film. I particularly liked the way they mapped out Wilie's routes through Manhattan using arrows over a satellite view of the city. It really gave you a sense of the scope of his travels, whether you're familiar or not with New York.

The "bad guy" is a corrupt police detective named Bobby Monday (this film has some terrible character names) played by Michael Shannon (who was nominated for an Oscar in 2008's Revolutionary Road. I don't know if it was Michael Shannon's performance or sheerly the writing, but I didn't find him convincing at all. He was like a cartoon caricature of a villain.