Rated PG-13 for language and violence

By Joseph Hunter
BEACON COLUMNIST

posted Aug 31, 2012 - 2:32:32pm

Premium Rush is your cool uncle who gives you your desert without supper – but only afterward do you realize a bit of broccoli would have made the rest of the experience that much sweeter.

That is to say, Premium Rush is exactly what it looks like: A fun, frenetic film that tries to turn bike messengers into everyman action heroes. Fun and frenetic this movie is, but writer/director David Koepp banks too much on his audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief about bike messengers: This film speaks to the young, CrossFit-loving, X Games-watching, Mtn. Dew-swilling youth that exists as a relative footnote to a much broader, more traditional, if modernized, audience.

Premium Rush is an action movie about bike courier Joseph Gordon-Levitt doing fixed-gear bike stunts around New York City while trying to deliver a time-sensitive package worth $50,000. Meanwhile, a corrupt cop named Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon) hunts him down in an attempt to confiscate said package to pay off his recently incurred gambling debts.

There’s more to it than that, but it all seems superfluous, serving to add a murky sort of context to what otherwise is one of the summer’s most fun movies. It’s little more than a classic chase film, which Koepp never lets us forget: Gordon-Levitt’s character’s name is Wilee, like the notorious Coyote (only this time, he’s the chased and not the chaser).

If you’re looking for nonstop action that won’t offend anyone, you’ll find it here: Violence is kept to a relative minimum, but Gordon-Levitt and his crew will tire you out with their constant peddling. The film doesn’t slow down – much like Wilee, who, as a major plot device, deliberately cuts the brakes off his ride because he’s just that hardcore – except for in a few flashbacks meant to set the scene for the film’s plot. And in that way, Premium Rush is brilliant.

You see, it’s told very nearly in real-time, meaning it takes place roughly from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. movie-time during its 90-minute run. Except it’s told in a nonlinear fashion, almost like Quentin Tarantino snuck in some edits in the cutting room. It’s in this manner that we find out Wilee’s girlfriend-slash-coworker Vanessa (Dania Ramirez) is very near breaking up with him while simultaneously being kicked out of her apartment by her roommate (Jamie Chung) who it so happens is responsible for giving Wilee the damned package for which he’s being hunted.

But forget about the convoluted, forced story. If you’re going to see Premium Rush, you already know its plot is just an excuse to get from awesome bike stunt A to awesome bike stunt B. And the icing on top of the frantic action and crazy pacing is the film’s visual effects, which are some of the most unique of the year: Rather than jump cuts from place to place, Koepp often employs a three-dimensional zoom-in/zoom-out of New York City that allows scenes to shift with no momentum being lost.

Premium Rush is a strange type of movie, not very good by any definition, but it accomplishes being so in an utterly forgivable way. Two or three days after you leave the theater, you might not remember the plot’s finer details (and I use the term “finer” very loosely), but you’ll certainly remember the experience, the effects and the stunts. That’s kind of the point.

Stars & Popcorn grade: 2 stars, 4 popcorn.

— Hunter serves as editor-in-chief for movie-review website Stars and Popcorn. To learn more about Stars and Popcorn, visit www.starsandpopcorn.com. Send e-mail to Hunter at joseph@starsandpopcorn.com

Sponsored by Liebe Entertainment Group, Marketplace 8. Click here to see showtimes for Premium Rush

— info@beacononlinenews.com

---

Comment on this article

Commenting is closed for this article.

If you would like to contribute a letter to the editor, please click here.

---

Did you find this story interesting or informative? Subscribe to The West Volusia Beacon to read more stories by Joseph Hunter, along with others from our award-winning writers. Subscribe now!