Premium Rush

My Grade:  B-

When I heard about Premium Rush, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it because it is an action movie about bike messengers... doesn’t sound too exciting.  But I tend to enjoy films that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in.  So, of course, I decided to see it.  And I’m glad I did because it is quite entertaining.

Premium Rush is what you would get if you combined The Bourne Identity with Fast Five because Wilee (like Jason Bourne) is constantly on the run and there are tons of road chase scenes (like Fast Five).  The short version of the story is that Wilee, a very skilled bike messenger in New York, is hired to deliver a package across town; however, that package is very valuable and a dirty cop wants to take it from Wilee.  Pretty simple right?  Right.  There is a B-story about Wilee, his love interest named Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), and her new “friend” named Manny (Wole Parks), but it could have been left out and the film would be just as good.

The best thing about this film is the action.  It is intense and there is a lot of it.  As I mentioned before, the film is basically one long chase scene.  What makes the chases interesting, though, is that they involve cars versus bikes.  It’s much more dangerous for the bikes, but the cars are unable to go certain places and do certain things that the bikes can.  Throw in some BMX style bike tricks and you have some pretty exciting stuff.  Some of the chase segments do get a little long, though.

The acting is pretty good, too.  Of course Gordon-Levitt (Inception, 500 Days of Summer) is good but he is the only really well-known actor in it.  The rest of the cast (Michael Shannon, Dania Ramirez, Aasif Mandvi, Wole Parks, and others) have a good bit of experience but none of them have the star power to make people want to see the film based solely on their being in it.  That is interesting to me because, while Gordon-Levitt is quickly becoming a box-office powerhouse, he hasn’t ever been the only big star in one of his mainstream films (he used to do a lot of indies).  50/50 included Seth Rogen, INCEPTION had Leonardo DiCaprio (and others), and 500 Days of Summer also starred Zooey Deschanel.  The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t even have to be mentioned.

The writing is good enough to allow for the strong action.  The reason Wilee’s delivery is so important is pretty cliche and it seems like the writers think it’s more emotionally gripping than it really is.  This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when you realize that David Koepp and John Kamps worked together on the script.  Koepp  is much more experienced than Kamps:  he rewrote Michael Crichton’s original script for Jurassic Park (1993), adapted Edwin Torres’s novels into Carlito's Way (1993), worked with Chinatown scribe Robert Towne on Mission:  Impossible (1996), wrote the script for Spider-Man (2002), etc.  Kamps, on the other hand, is known for writing the story for Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers:  The Movie, and the screenplay for Zathura:  A Space Adventure.  You can just look at those films and know that teaming these two writers will not allow for a deeply emotional film that will tug at your heartstrings.

Other than the predictable, emotionally shallow writing, the only other big issues I have with Premium Rush have to do with Michael Shannon’s character.  Throughout the film, he does what I can only imagine he thinks is a New Yorker accent, but it is rather annoying.  His character also doesn’t have a very good reason for his continued pursuit of Wilee.  The best villains in film are villains that could feasibly think they are the good guys (or at least are doing the right thing).  Bobby Monday isn’t even close.

Overall, Premium Rush is very entertaining even though it is almost entirely surface thrills without any depth of emotion or characters.  While being mostly cliche and predictable, it does do some interesting things with the narrative structure that serves the film well.  There are also a good number of solid laughs throughout the film.  It’s worth renting but you probably won’t remember it for long.