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Movie Review by:
"Sweet" Dan Sweet |
Directed by:
Paul McGuigan |
Written by:
David Bourla |
Starring:
Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle |
Running time:
111 minutes
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Released:
02/06/09
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Rated PG-13
for intense sequences of
violence and action, brief strong language, smoking a scene of teen drinking. |
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"The sheer contrived nature of how everything seemed to fall into place for
all the characters, all the time just cemented the amateurish style of
storytelling"
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Seriously, I must have missed a memo. Since when is
actor Chris Evans THE go-to-guy for all films comic bookish? Really, take a
look at this guy’s track record with me: Fantastic Four, FF2:Rise of the Silver
Surfer, TMNT (he’s the voice of Casey Jones), appearances on fan-boy classic
Robot Chicken, an upcoming role in the Scott Pilgrim VS. The World film (It’s an
indie title. It’s in the store. Look for it). With his most recent outing the
young actor finds himself teamed up with director Paul McGuigan (Wicker Park,
Lucky Number Slevin) for a new take on superhero action in the movie Push.
Evans plays Nick, a ‘mover’, which is the hip and trendy way of saying a
telekinetic, which is cool. This is where it’s gonna get complicated, in
addition to ‘movers,’ there are also ‘shifts’, ‘stitches’, ‘pushers’, ‘sniffs’,
‘watchers’, ‘bleeders’, and ‘shades.’ Are you still with me? Add to the mix a
shady government agency called…wait for it…‘The Division,’ (awesome right? I
know) run by a scary guy named Carver who is a ‘pusher’ or someone who can make
people do things just by thinking about it. Carver is intent on creating a
formula to boost the natural abilities of those with powers, but so far, none of
those experimented on by him or ‘The Division’ has survived the injection of the
necessary drug. But wait, that all changes when a young woman, named Kira, also
a ‘pusher,’ not only survives the needle, but also escapes, and makes off with
the last of the special drug used in the testing.
When the movie opens Nick is laying low in Hong Kong, gambling to get by, and
learning about his abilities at a frighteningly slow pace. The audience is left
to assume that he’s been in this lifestyle for sometime, seeing as how he has a
very strong if not fluent grasp of the Chinese language and customs, which makes
it all the more confusing when in the very next scene his hideout is discovered
not once, but twice. Two of ‘The Division’s’ ‘sniffs’ have tracked down Nick to
his home based on the scent of his power trail. They search things, touch a lot
of stuff that doesn’t belong to them, and smell almost everything, all the while
interrogating Nick as to the location of a girl he hasn’t met, and a briefcase
he’s never seen. When the bad guys leave Nick thinks he’s in the clear, and
even though he was warned not to try to flee, he begins to pack up his stuff,
when there’s another knock at the door. Cue suspenseful music.
As soon as Dakota Fanning walked through the door as fourteen-year-old Cassie
everyone in the theater seemed to relax a little bit. As it turns out Cassie is
a ‘watcher,’ or a clairvoyant, who has seen the future (and the girl, and the
briefcase) and absolutely must have Nick’s help. Even in the most cliché of
roles Fanning oozed intensity and charisma. Too bad the material called for so
much non-sensible banter, and circular logic (I can see the future, we’re gonna
die, but the future is changeable, but we’re still gonna die, blah blah blah).
First up are the ‘bleeders.’ These guys work as enforcers for the local Triad
boss, and their powers are pretty simple, they yell really loud until your brain
melts. Ouch. Obviously Nick and Cassie are not the only ones on the hunt for
the drug, or the girl. There’s a fight, which ends poorly for Nick, but thanks
to a ‘stitch,’ a woman who can repair injuries just by touching them, him and
Cassie are back on the hunt in no time. We meet a ‘Shift’ who can turn anything
into anything else for a limited amount of time, the idea of which is
fascinating, but nothing really comes to fruition, so let’s move on. We meet
another ‘sniff’ who uses her powers as a faux fortune teller/seer as a way to
make ends meet. She lets them know where to find the mystery girl everyone’s
looking for, so that’s what they do. And this is only the half-way point, sigh.
Now Carver is an interesting character, played masterfully by Djimon Honsou, but
the movie never lets us get to know him, just like it doesn’t allow us enough
time with any of the other characters whose abilities we just get a glimpse of.
This film tries very hard to be a lot of different things, and unfortunately
misses the mark on almost all of them. There’s a whole intro scene with Nick as
a little boy watching his father die at the hands of ‘The Division’ and Carver
in particular, which to me, seemed like a logical starting point for a
franchise, the beginning.
Instead of trying to jam all this stuff down our throats at the same time they
should have introduced us to the main players, and I don’t know, give us a
chance to care about them before they bombard us with more characters we can’t
possibly begin to give a crap about. At the beginning of the movie Nick barely
can control his powers, by the end of it he’s a master of them, with nothing in
between really showing us what brought about the change. Add to that, some
asinine plot thread involving Cassie’s mother, also a watcher, setting the whole
thing up, even though she’s never introduced on screen. The sheer contrived
nature of how everything seemed to fall into place for all the characters, all
the time just cemented the amateurish style of storytelling.
You can almost still hear the ringing of cash registers echoing in the empty
heads of Hollywood movie studio bigwigs as they sat around, trying harder than
hell to come up with the next big, multi-million dollar franchise, but only
almost. Ultimately all you hear is the cacophony of pain and suffering that you
can only hope is the physical embodiment of their careers, writhing on the floor
in pain and agony from being ferociously and repeatedly kicked in the nuts, but
it’s probably some poor guy who just finished watching Push.
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PUSH © 2009 Infinity Media,
Inc., Icon Productions, Infinity Features
All Rights Reserved
Review © 2009 Alternate Reality, Inc.
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