Bike courier thriller fails to deliver
Title promises above- average fare but it’s the same old action package, despite the skinned knees
Thanks to Michael Shannon, stunt cyclists and Google Maps,
Premium Rush at least gives us something interesting to look at for 90 minutes. The plot, however, keeps slipping out of gear.
The first, and perhaps only, major motion picture to address the existential challenge of life as experienced through the eyes of a bike courier, Premium Rush spins on its own hub of chainring religion.
We hear the gospel in voiceover, as our anti- hero Wilee ( Joseph Gordon- Levitt) takes to the streets of Manhattan with urgent packages that have to be delivered crosstown. An old- school cycling demon who eschews gears and derailleurs in favour of fixed links and a steel frame, Wilee loves to tell us how brakes are what get you into trouble.
Most of the time, in his experience at any rate, it’s best to just keep your momentum and spin through it, even if that means careening through intersections and getting bounced off the odd windshield or two.
Certainly, Wilee has found himself plastered to tempered glass before, and it’s what we watch him do in the opening sequence as he’s launched off his bicycle and flipped several meters in to the air.
The scene unfolds in super slow- motion, and at this point, director- writer David Koepp introduces the ever- dependable — but always grating — device of the clock in the corner of the screen. Wilee gets hit at a climactic moment in the narrative, but we don’t know it yet because we have to spin back a few hours to see the whole setup. After all, bike couriers hardly incite the kind of rage that would ever prompt a reasonable driver to act in a passive- aggressive manner.
Wilee must have made a mistake, or upset someone he shouldn’t have, in order to get launched off his wheels.
Dragging us into the back alley of backstory, Koepp pummels the viewer with a sob story about a woman trying to get her son out of China. She needed to transfer the money to some smugglers, but she couldn’t do it through any bank: She needed to turn the money into a single envelope with a cash IOU that could then be taken to the coyote in Chinatown.
It’s complicated and just a little tedious, but it’s completely unimportant. It’s just the setup to excuse the series of extreme bike stunts in the streets of Manhattan, and depending on what kind of crankhead you are, this will either feel like the best movie ever made – or being trapped in some 20- year- old’s personal fantasy.
Even if it’s the latter, there is some solace in the film’s clear possession of a thought pattern, and consistent point of view.
This is a movie about Wilee and his resistance to the status quo. Like all heroic rebels, Wilee had a chance at being a tool in a suit behind the wheel of a luxury car, but he decided to squander his law school education and not write the bar.
He wanted to live freely, and love freely, as a bicycle courier — because that’s his idea of romantic truth. It’s also his community.
Wilee is surrounded by friends when he’s on the streets, so when he’s forced to dodge cops and bullets, he uses resources that only a bike courier can exploit — whether it’s the handy placement of a tow bar or a friend and a colleague who’s good at swinging a bike lock.
Those crazy riders take care of each other, and in that way, they make a good foil to the villain in the piece: The ever- eerie Michael Shannon, who plays a dirty cop who needs the IOU to clear his gambling debt with the mob.
Every single scene featuring Shannon isn’t just menacing, it’s also wickedly fun because he finds the sweet spot between maniacal evil and goofy comedy.
When his mouth fills with blood after a goon dislodges a tooth, he stands up in shock and utters: “There are rules!”
It’s this sanguine gap between tragic violence and gratuitous action comedy that Premium Rush gets the biggest buzz because it’s actually trying to deliver something new. The sad fact is, for all skinned knees and bent rims, it’s the same old action package — just on a bike.