Just when you think you’ve seen it all — superheroes in spaceships, superheroes in cars, superheroes riding other superheroes — Hollywood strikes again, this time with superheroes that ride bikes and deliver mail no less. But before you go off thinking that Hollywood has truly run out of ideas, this weekend’s newly released “Premium Rush” isn’t so bad. With some incredibly painfully looking stunt-packed scenes and a few of cinema’s bigger names (insert long list of names no one’s ever heard of and Joseph Gordon Levitt here) “Premium Rush” turns out to be a simple mindlessly entertaining story. And really, who can ever get enough mindless entertainment?
Meet Wilee (Gordon-Levitt), a newly-graduated law student who works as a bike courier in the busy busy streets of New York. When FedEx falls through, Wilee’s your man. The only thing more bizarre than his life on the job is his need to “ride like hell.” He’s a daredevil among daredevils. In fact the only thing he actually seems to fear are suits and cubicles. And this guy rides sans brakes, gears and common sense.
The story picks up on a fateful afternoon when Wilee is specially requested to deliver a small dinky envelope that carries a lot of invisible weight. Of course he doesn’t start to suspect anything until he almost gets run over by a dirty cop (Michael Shannon) who tries to intercept the message in an effort to save face from the deep hole he’s dug himself into. Wilee, ever the rebel, refuses to give up the package, even though he has yet to figure out what he’s carrying. Eventually his desperate curiosity, as to why he’s being chased around the city by a crazy cop overshadows any potential legal trouble he could get into, and he opens the letter. When he makes the decision to carry out the delivery it leads to countless more near-death chases, bike vs car style. And although these action sequences may sound a bit basic and predictable—which they are—the visual angles and stunts the producers manage to sneak in, which Gordon-Levitt claims to have done mostly himself, keeps you engaged and entertained. Not to mention the whole “Sherlock Holmes hypothetical scenario” which plays out every time Wilee crosses an intersection. Also, The upbeat alternative song played over the chases makes the scene a thousand times more cooler.
These insane bike scenes make up the brunt of the relatively short 91-minute film, With a few weaker subplots in the storyline, one of which includes Wilee’s love interest Vanessa ( Dania Ramierez) who he spends a great deal of the movie trying to win back after she breaks up with him for reasons unknown. The tangent adds absolutely nothing to the plot except to prove that Gordon-Levitt’s character can get a girl.
In short, “Premium Rush” is a fun, fast film that has “summer flick” written all over it. Now believable, thats a different story.
