by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s movie at the San Diego Central Library, Premium
Rush, sounded interesting from the
description on the library’s flyer — “In Manhattan, a bike messenger picks up
an envelope that attracts the interest of a dirty cop, who pursues the cyclist
throughout the city” — and turned out to be even better than the flyer made it
sound. It’s not a deathless masterpiece but it’s a quite entertaining 90-minute
thrill ride through the streets of New York City. The bike messenger is Wilee
(Joseph Gordon-Levitt) — that’s how his name is spelled, and he, like most of
the characters, has no last name — and he expresses his credo in a voice-over narration at the beginning: “I can’t
work in an office. I don’t like wearing suits. I like to ride. Fixed gear,
steel frame, no brakes. The bike cannot coast. The pedals never stop turning.
Can’t stop. Don’t want to, either. There are 1,500 bike messengers on the
streets of New York City. You can e-mail it, FedEx it, fax it, scan it, but
when none of that shit works and this thing has to be at that place by this
time, you need us.” The corrupt cop — though it’s not until about halfway
through the movie that we realize he is corrupt and not just an asshole cop representing the forces of evil
collectivism against our individualistic free-spirited hero — is plainclothes
detective Bobby Monday (a marvelous performance by Michael Shannon that manages
to make the character both idiotic and menacing at the same time, much the way
Ben Stein did with the dean in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), who’s after a ticket Nima (Jamie Chung,
appealingly dressed in a skin-tight black pantsuit that shows off her bod quite
nicely) is having delivered for mysterious reasons writer-director David Koepp
and his writing partner, John Kamps don’t let us in on until midway through the
movie.
The characters have various connections: Nima has just evicted her
roommate Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), who’s also Wilee’s girlfriend — or at least was Wilee’s girlfriend until she dumped him for fellow
bike messenger Manny (Wolé Parks, a hot, muscular African-American who frankly
did more for me aesthetically than Joseph Gordon-Levitt!), who unlike Wilee
rides a bike that does have
multiple speeds. Nima has raised $10,000 by working three jobs and has turned
it over to a secret and very
illegal private Chinese banking system run out of a beauty parlor; the idea is
the money is destined for the human traffickers she’s hired to bring her son
from China to join her in the U.S. He would technically be a documented
immigrant since she’s here on a student visa and its terms say her kid can join
her here, but she hasn’t been able to get him into the country by normal means,
so she’s had to hire a smuggler. The ticket she needs to get the money to the
traffickers is a smiley face written on an old lottery ticket, and that’s what’s in the envelope Wilee picks up from her and
is driving around town, while Bobby Monday and just about everyone else in the
cast is after it — Bobby wants it because if he has the ticket he can claim the
money and steal it, and to that end, when Wilee gets tired of being chased by
all and sundry because something
hot is in that envelope (and he naturally assumes it has something to do with
illegal drugs), he turns it back to his boss, Raj (Aasif Mandvi), and Monday
manages to get the envelope assigned to Wilee’s romantic rival Manny instead and re-routed to a different address, a flower shop
that’s presumably a front for some illegal enterprises in which he is involved. There are also two non-corrupt cops in
uniform who ride bikes as part of their patrol and try to bust Wilee and Manny
as they run a race through Central Park — the winner gets the mysterious
envelope and the $50 (almost twice the going rate) fee for delivering it — in
what’s probably the most delicious scene in a quite good thrill-ride of a
movie: as they’re pedaling uphill Manny taunts at how hard Wilee has to work
and says, “Don’t you wish your bike had gears?” Then Wilee overtakes him as
they get to the top of the hill and they have to go down it again.
The film
opens with Wilee taking a spectacular wipe-out in the middle of a New York
street, then flashes back — the film shows us video overlays of what time it is
so Koepp and Kamps keep us abreast of not only where but when we are, something a lot of people who make
non-linear movies don’t bother to do — and after the wipe-out Wilee’s bike (in
whose handlebars he’s hidden the envelope once he’s realized what it is, what
its significance is, and decided he’s going to help Nima get her son back) is impounded
by the police and Monday literally
tortures him in the back of an ambulance to get him to reveal where the
envelope is. He’s rescued by Vanessa, who’s also a bike messenger, and eventually she gets Raj to
call out all the bike messengers
in New York City to take down the bad guys and make sure the smugglers get the
money so Nima can get her son (an ending copped from the 1938 film Big
City, about the late-1930’s “taxi wars”
between rival cab companies in New York City, in which star Spencer Tracy, playing
an indie cab driver, gets his fellow cabbies to save him from the clutches of
the giant corporation that’s trying to take over the entire New York taxi
business). Premium Rush — whose
original advertising poster featured the slogan “Ride Like Hell,” which I think
would have been a better title for the film — is a movie which comes off sort
of like Koepp and Kamps said to each other, “Hey, let’s do La Femme
Nikita in New York — only we’ll make the
lead a guy and make him a bike messenger!” It’s got the same sort of edgy
energy and it’s a wonderful movie, as well as featuring some spectacular stunts
(some of them done with stunt doubles — though Joseph Gordon-Levitt did a lot
of his own riding and had an accident for real, cell-phone footage of which appears
in a cut-in sequence during the credits — while others were CGI) and never
letting up on the sheer excitement level. It’s not a movie I would have sought
out on my own but I’m glad I had the chance to see it!
