Location
Wide Release
Dates
Opens Aug. 24Premium Rush begs you to surrender yourself to the pure joy of kinetic energy: hurtling on a bicycle between cars, through red lights, headed the wrong way down one-way streets. ?Brakes are death,? proclaims the daredevil New York City bike messenger Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who might genuinely believe that if he stands still for long he?ll cease to exist.
The camera follows him through even the tightest spaces, and you can?t help but feel the anxiety of what would happen if suddenly a taxi door were to open or a pedestrian were to step into the street. Yet there?s no option other than to keep moving, and it?s a thrill.
With its dead-simple plot, compressed timeline, use of flashbacks to reveal a story that starts in the middle rather than at the beginning, and its urgent celebration of movement, director David Koepp?s film reminds me of Tom Tykwer?s great Run Lola Run (even if Premium Rush didn?t leave me buzzing with quite that much pleasure).
Never mind the somewhat ridiculous storyline, in which a corrupt cop (Michael Shannon), in debt to the Chinese underworld, tries to steal a message that Wilee has been entrusted to deliver. Never mind that the film cheats in its use of time, pretending that an unbelievable number of events can occur between 6:33 and 7 p.m. All else is forgotten once Wilee jumps on his bike.
We?re then in the world of which he is a master, calculating routes across the city and whizzing any which way he can. The film?s best device takes us into Wilee?s mind as he makes what must be split-second decisions about how to cross dangerously busy intersections. We?re shown each of his options, in slow motion, as he considers them, and we?re cheered when he finds the counterintuitive path that will lead to safety.
He?s part of a fraternity of bike messengers, a group portrayed as the most hated people in New York because of the dangerous tactics they employ to make their deliveries on time. We?re supposed to respect Wilee more than most of them because he?s a Columbia Law School graduate who rides for the love of it, not because he lacks other options for making a living. His girlfriend Vanessa (Dania Ramirez) also rides, but getting a cushy office job someday sounds perfect to her.
It?s the chase scenes that make this a movie worth seeing. Michael Shannon?s unhinged cop (no actor does unhinged better) zigs and zags his car through the streets to catch Wilee even as a patrol officer on a bike also gives pursuit. Later, Wilee has to race rival messenger Manny (Wol? Parks) while that same bike cop is again after him. And those are just the two showcase sequences ? Koepp likes to keep his actors and his camera moving throughout.
At the end of the spry 91 minutes, I wanted to sprint out of the theater, and I mean that in the best possible way.
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