Push
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 51 minutes
Directed by: Paul McGuigan
Starring:
Chris Evans - Nick Grant
Dakota Fanning - Cassie Holmes
Camilla Belle - Kira Hudson
Djimon Hounsou - Henry Carver
Push is promising. As opposed to the individualized mutant superheroes of X-Men and Heroes, Push opts for a kind of class-system, where there are a finite amount of abilities but multiple people have the same ability and some people may be better at that ability than others. There's a war brewing between "Division" which wants to harness these special beings in order to rule the world and those who just want to be left alone. When Division creates a super-power steroid and its patient zero Kira (Camille Bell) escapes, there's a rush to find her between the eeeeevil division agent Carver (Djimon Honsou) and the good guys who are kind of bad at their powers, Nick (Chris Evans) who is a "mover" (telekinesis) and Cassie (Dakota Fanning) who is a "watcher" (clairvoyant). It's a neat little set-up for a kind of Stratego-like battle where it's all about how the different pieces interact with each other.
There are some other abilities scattered throughout the film, most of them pretty lame. There are "sniffers" and "feelers" who can find people by sniffing or touching objects their target has used; there are screamers who just look ridiculous as they…well, take a guess. The only two cool powers are "shifters" who can shape-shift objects for brief period of time and "pushers" and they can put thoughts in your head. I think a film of just pushers would have been great and really fucked with the narrative, confused the viewers about who they could trust, and made a comment about a pliable reality based on memories. But Push wants to be an action movie. Unfortunately, it wants to be a very lame, reality-based superhero action movie.
No one has cracked the reality-based superhero yet. They don't seem to understand that it's not the environment we require realness from; it's the emotions and most of the characters in Push are barely there. Nick is the "hero" but he doesn't seem to feel that passionately about getting revenge against Carver (who killed Nick's father ten years ago for some reason that's never explained) or helping Kira who, hey-hey, happens to be his ex-girlfriend. He's doing it because he's the leading man. He's just the leading man that has to be goaded into manning up by a thirteen-year-old girl.
The real hero of the film is, shockingly, Dakota Fanning. While it's been fun to mock her precociousness through her younger days, she's now a teenager and what was once the irritating behavior of a know-it-all kid has now become wry, sardonic wit simply by virtue of her aging. If Push is the signal of what we can now expect from Fanning, I look forward to seeing this new phase of her career.
The other star of the film is Hong Kong. Rarely do we get such a full-look at a city but Push seems to take us everywhere. Sadly, the ride around this locale could be more exhilarating but everything is muted by the grainy, handheld cinematography. The reality of Push isn't a vibrant non-stop city but simply bland hustle-and-bustle. That boring style is made all the worse in the atrocious action scenes as director Paul McGuigan manages to take the extraordinary and turn it into the mundane. I'm still trying to decide which action scene was more ridiculous: the screamers and their weird cat-eyes or Chris Evans and Neil Jackson firing floating pistols at each other. It's the floating pistols. It looks like they're being held up by dental floss.
Push loves its world of special powers in the big Hong Kong landscape but it doesn't love those powers or the characters that using them. It has all the energy of a trip to the grocery store and for all its scope, there's not a hint of intimacy or passion.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
2.5.09