Premium Rush (PG-13)

      I enjoy action movies. After all, who doesn't? However, action movies are, sometimes, violent for the sake of violence. However, Premium Rush was not one of those films. Premium Rush centers around a young and daring bicycle messenger (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in New York City. This messenger, named Wilee, is considered the best at what he does. After being in an accident while on a delivery, Wilee has removed the gears and brakes from his bike saying: "brakes are death." The young protagonist races through the clogged New York streets, sometimes just barely avoiding cabs and trucks. At the start of the film, Wilee picks up a envelope from a college student named Nima with the instructions to deliver it to China Town by 7:00 p.m. Little does Wilee know the danger of the mission he has just undertaken. As soon as Wilee picks up the envelope, a dirty cop named Bobby Monday (played by Michael Shannon) pursues him throughout the city in search of the envelope. As the movie progresses we find that the ticket inside the envelope represents an exorbitant amount of money that Nima plans to use in order to smuggle her son out of China. Monday, on the other hand, wants the money to pay off a lone shark he owes money to.

Wilee races through the New York streets

      Allow me to digress for a moment here. I am extremely impressed with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's body of work recently. He has played leading characters in four highly successful movies just last year (Lincoln, Premium Rush, the Dark Night Rises, and Looper). Not only that but he has displayed skillful acting capabilities in all four movies. In this film, Premium Rush, Gordon-Levitt did a great job playing the daring Wilee. Another character I really enjoyed in Premium Rush was Manny (played by Wole Parks). Manny is, to use the words of Wilee himself, "a 'roided-up freak". Manny is another bike messenger who is not as daring as Wilee but faster. Manny's arrogance brought some comic relief to an otherwise suspenseful movie.

      Perhaps my favorite thing about Premium Rush was the editing done to show you Wilee's position in the Big Apple or even whats going on in his mind. On occasion, the camera would zoom out to show an aerial view of New York with a yellow line tracing Wilee's route. This was interesting to see because it shows the audience how brutally long some of these bike routes really are. Even cooler than this was what happened whenever Wilee was in a particularly sticky situation. Time would freeze and Wilee would give thought to alternate routes. For example, at one point, Wilee stops to consider where to go at an intersection and sees that if he went one way he would take out a baby stroller, while if he went another, he would push a pedestrian into the path of an oncoming bus.

     My only complaint about Premium Rush would be that at times, the number of flash-backs made the story somewhat hard to follow. However, all in all, I found this film to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller that is definitely worth watching. That's all for me and as always, thanks for reading!

Picture courtesy of: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/08/24/arts/24PREMIUM_SPAN/24PREMIUM_SPAN-articleLarge.jpg