PREMIUM RUSH (2012)

Genre: Action/Thriller
Director: David Koepp
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jamie Chung, Michael Shannon, Dania Ramirez, Aasif Mandvi, Aaron Tveit, Lauren Ashley Carter, Ashley Austin Morris, Nick Damici, Jennifer Butler
RunTime: 1 hr 31 mins
Rating: PG13 (Some Coarse Language)
Released By:  Sony Pictures Releasing International
Official Website: http://premiumrush.com/

Opening Day: 27 September 2012

Synopsis: Dodging speeding cars, crazed cabbies, open doors, and eight million cranky pedestrians is all in a day's work for Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the best of New York's agile and aggressive bicycle messengers. It takes a special breed to ride the fixie - super lightweight, single-gear bikes with no brakes and riders who are equal part skilled cyclists and suicidal nutcases who risk becoming a smear on the pavement every time they head into traffic. But a guy who's used to putting his life on the line is about to get more than even he is used to when a routine delivery turns into a life or death chase through the streets of Manhattan. When Wilee picks up his last envelope of the day on a premium rush run, he discovers this package is different. This time, someone is actually trying to kill him.

Movie Review:

In life, one shouldn’t stop. It’s an odd philosophy that bike messenger Wilee has and it sounds pretty harmless until you consider that he actually applies it to his get-from-point-A-to-point-B-quickly job, refusing to have any brakes on the bicycle that he uses to weave in and out of busy traffic daily. In many ways, Wilee’s unchanging obligation to his principle represents the movie he’s in. Certainly that has to be the attitude of a cycling-centric chase movie like Premium Rush. By embracing the heart of its premise, even at the risk of being anathema to mainstream Hollywood, Premium Rush manages to instantly become a curious package that’s easy to admire even though it might not be as good as the best chase movies.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, coming right off a sterling performance as a rookie cop in The Dark Knight Rises, fills the shoes of Wilee, the bike messenger who has no intention to stop until he arrives at his destination. This narrow-minded ambition and his single-gear, no-brakes policy automatically qualify him as New York City’s peerless bicycle messenger. The problem? He becomes the target of suspicious characters who want to deliver life-or-death materials. A routine delivery one day turns into a race for his life as he quickly discovers that a crooked cop is actually willing to kill him to get to the contents of the envelope he’s holding.

From the beginning of the movie, with Wilee flying across the screen in faux slow motion, arms and legs splayed, and numbers that show up to rewind the time to hours before this unfortunate event, it’s obvious that Premium Rush is created around a great sense of urgency, matched in equal measure by lighter touches of comedy. It’s at once completely thrilling and completely hilarious to see the movie pull the screen out into a Google Maps-esque overlay every time Wilee needs to trace the shortest route to his destination or slow Wilee’s breakneck speed to a crawl as he quickly analyses the best way to get past oncoming obstacles, always playing out the worst-case scenarios with cartoonish effects.   

At the core of these mechanics is time. Getting to every destination in the shortest amount of time possible and quickly dodging every obstacle become the least of Wilee’s worries when there’s also a corrupted cop breathing down his neck and a bicycle-riding NYPD patrol officer who comically happens to respond to every call involving Wilee’s cycling-so-fast-it’s-dangerous infraction. Michael Shannon offers a particularly hammy performance as the shady cop, shouting self-aware lines like ‘I am chasing a bicycle in a car!’ and always dangerously close to arresting Wilee before letting him slip under his guard with the cachet of a Looney Tunes villain. More importantly, these plot devices allow for a really fast-paced movie.

The only limit to that pace, then, is the time leaping trick that Premium Rush exploits over many instances, preventing you from watching the movie in a proper sequence until it’s nearing the end. As you may have learnt from many movies before Premium Rush, when a movie starts to futz around with chronology, it enters a choke point of its own design. With the right plot, travelling back in time to tell the events that predate the current plight can introduce more suspense. In Premium Rush, however, the plot is so wafer-thin that it actually makes more sense to tell the story in a proper sequence. The decision to reveal the origins of the suspicious content fairly early doesn’t necessarily cripple the movie, but it does remove a great deal of mystery surrounding the show.

At the end of the day, Premium Rush remains a great movie. It’s a refreshing and spirited effort that ventures onto areas that a lesser filmmaker would prefer not to explore. That said, Premium Rush is a movie about cycling through and through, so it’ll be easier to appreciate if you already have a basic liking for cycling. Beyond that, it’s fast-paced and funny although it suffers from an anorexic story and questionable plotting. If anything, those are minor gripes, so don’t let those stop from you from enjoying this unique flick.

Movie Rating:  

(Not the best chase movie, but it’s fast-paced and funny, with a focus on cycling that makes it a curious package to explore)

Review by Loh Yong Jian