LOWDOWN:
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.
REVIEW:
The acting is pretty good but the characterizations are fairly weak. Our hero does what he does for the thrill of it all, but shouldn't there be a better reason than that? He is in love with his fellow messenger Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), but this is the type of movie that doesn't really need a love interest let alone a love triangle. His main rival is Manny (Wole Parks) and he's more like a professional cyclist. A bit too competitive for a simple bike messenger career, but at least he didn't go for the "no brakes" crap. I ended up liking him just as much as Wilee but I'm sure that can't be the film's intention. Aasif Mandvi as the boss of the messenger service company gets a really good line as he throws out his intentions of making it a love quartet.
It won't provoke a deeply spiritual feeling or make you ponder existance. What it will do is keep your heart pounding and your eyes glued to the screen. It's smartly filmed and edited in a way that keeps going back on itself to really explain these characters' motivations, while unravelling a tight plot. The movie certainly suffers with the dialogue. They're trying to be trendy with Shannon explaining his dislike of the use of the words douche bag and suck it. Trying to be trendy never really is trendy especially when the hook of the movie - bike messengers - hit its peak in popularity, or curiosity, around a decade before the release of this film.
OVERALL:
As an action movie, PREMIUM RUSH never goes as big as other similar movies do, but they do find the right roads to take to make it as thrilling as possible.
TRAILER:
CREDITS:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Wilee, a New York City bicycle messenger
Michael Shannon as Bobby Monday, a dirty cop
Aaron Tveit as Kyle
Jamie Chung as Nima
Dania Ramirez as Vanessa, a bicycle messenger
Aasif Mandvi as Raj
Directed by David Koepp
Produced by Gavin Polone
Written by David Koepp and John Kamps
Music by David Sardy
Cinematography Mitchell Amundsen
Editing by Derek Ambrosi and Jill Savitt
Pictured Right: Me and my family at my job, and yes: I get paid to ride a bike lol
-Brian Lansangan
Follow me on Twitter @MrSnugglenutz84
Produced by Gavin Polone
Written by David Koepp and John Kamps
Music by David Sardy
Cinematography Mitchell Amundsen
Editing by Derek Ambrosi and Jill Savitt
Pictured Right: Me and my family at my job, and yes: I get paid to ride a bike lol
-Brian Lansangan
Follow me on Twitter @MrSnugglenutz84
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