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PUSH
(*½)

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
Released:
02/06/09
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, brief strong language, smoking a scene of teen drinking.
"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"
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.
 

PUSH © 2009 Infinity Media, Inc., Icon Productions, Infinity Features
All Rights Reserved

Review © 2009 Alternate Reality, Inc.

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