Stealth Entertainment: Push
By Scott Lumley
July 31, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
But Hollywood's loss is our gain. There is a veritable treasure trove of film out there that you may not have seen. I will be your guide to this veritable wilderness of unwatched film. It will be my job to steer you towards the action, adventure, drama and comedy that may have eluded you, and at the same time, steer you away from some truly unwatchable dreck.
Hopefully we'll stumble across some entertainment that may have slid under your radar. Wish us luck.
Push (2009)
Push is a troubling film for me. On one hand, this is a movie with some excellent production values, created by a smaller company. It has an excellent if somewhat underground cast (Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Djimon Hounsou...) and a wicked concept. On the other hand, this is also a film that either sidesteps logic or fails to explain aspects of its plot. The third act and finale of this film left me with what can only be considered with a bad taste in my mouth. It was disappointing, despite the mandatory and enormous gunfight at the end of the film.
The film starts out ridiculously strong. Dakota Fanning's character Cassie lays out the groundwork and mythology of this world via voice over in a little less than three minutes, and it's an easy buy in. Nazi Germany, in an attempt to create super soldiers, located and started to develop people with extraordinary abilities. Cassie lays out the groundwork for all the abilities with descriptive but simple titles. Pushers, Sniffers, Shadows, Stitches... the list goes on and on.
The Germans are defeated after WWII, and other nations take up their own super soldier projects, called Divisions. One division in particular (America) is particularly aggressive in this regard, terminating people who refuse to come in for ‘training and testing'. (Training and testing being division code for imprisonment, torture and death.) The American division has also developed a serum that supercharges the abilities of any individual they give it to. Unfortunately, the serum also has a lot of side effects, the most prominent one being an ugly, painful and rapid death.
Naturally, the moment after Cassie finishes laying out the framework for this new world, we see a young woman (Kira, played by Camilla Belle.) being injected with the serum. She convulses, dies.... then her heart immediately restarts and she pops out of bed and immediately escapes in less than 60 seconds - with the help of a marble - from a super secure facility designed to secure psychics, telekinetics and people that can yell really, really loud.
That scene, as ridiculous as it sounds, is actually really well done. Between Cassie's voice over and the improbable escape, the movie was off to a roaring start and I couldn't wait to see more.
The movie then shifts to Hong Kong, or some other generic Asian city where Nick (Chris Evans) is hiding out. Nick has been laying low, trying not to use his abilities in the hope that Division sniffs will never find him. He does try to use his abilities a little bit to cheat at a local game of dice, which goes spectacularly wrong and leaves him $5,000 in the hole and seems to leave him with Asian gangsters looking to kick his ass when he is unable to even control the roll of a dice with his powers.
So we have our hero, Nick, his guide, Cassie, the bad guys, Division, a catalyst, Kira, and the drug. All this is backed up with an amazing premise - a world full of people with superpowers being hunted by other people with superpowers. This should have been a license to print money. Instead, this turned into a huge and unlikable mess filled with improbable turns and unexplained events. There literally appears to be a huge, unexplained deus ex machina plot twist for the final third of the film that I just couldn't buy into at all. This was a film that featured a pair of amazing battles between telekinetics, people with bizarre superhuman powers and shadow government divisions operating openly in public, yet it was the plot and characterization in this film that turned me off and eventually ruined this film for me.
Too often in Push, there are scenes that just aren't believable. Nick is a world class screw up and disinterested coward with little control over his powers. Yet, by the end of the film he's practically Darth Vader when it comes to his abilities. He can also develop, flesh out and execute a cunning plan that not only results in him defeating nearly every Asian gangster in the movie at once, but also results in the downfall of Division. Cassie is a world class precognitive, and there's a large chunk of the film devoted to her trying to get alcohol because she feels it will help her see things better. She finally does get some, and all it does is make her drunk. Either the director and editor decided to get ridiculously subtle here or this was a throwaway plot line that went nowhere.
I'm picking option B here, by the way.
In the end, Push is the most disappointing kind of film. It has a killer concept and a great cast and it looks really, really shiny. But that's really all it has. The story is jumbled and not well told and there are leaps of logic that are so poorly done that it breaks your ability to believe in this movie.
I really wanted to like Push. It looked like a great science fiction/action film and it should have knocked my socks off. Instead, it left me regretting the five bucks it cost me to rent it. And if you rent it, you're likely to feel the same way.
If you see Push on the shelves, push it away. It's not worth your money or your time.