Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Dania Ramirez look appalled — and they should be with this dumb flick.
If you’ve ever wondered why Manhattan bike messengers hurtle through red lights, barrel over sidewalks and fly the wrong way on one-way streets, “Premium Rush” provides an answer: The biker might be going to Chinatown with a movie ticket on which someone has scrawled a happy face.
Stakes aren’t the only problem with this sloppy thriller, which combines careening images with turgid storytelling. When an angry cop (Michael Shannon) tells bike messenger Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), “This whole city hates you!” I was certainly ready to join a standing ovation, but alas the cop, a degenerate gambler, is the bad guy. We’re supposed to root for the biker who daily breaks about 50 laws while endangering countless pedestrians.
Wilee is a Columbia graduate who’d rather make 80 bucks a day risking his life biking through traffic than put on a suit. His bike doesn’t even have brakes on it. Today’s assignment? Pick up a package at his alma mater and get it miles downtown to Chinatown in an hour and a half.
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You could do that on the subway, but that would be no fun. Wilee instead rockets through the streets pursued by Det. Monday (Shannon), who needs the ticket Wilee is carrying to pay off a debt, though Monday should probably be worried about other things, given that he has just killed a Chinese gangster with many surly friends.
The normally superb Shannon this time goes with nonstop screaming and a witch’s cackle, which makes his extremely dumb villain hilarious when he’s supposed to be scary. Meanwhile, another cop, this one honest but dorky, is speeding around on his bike trying to catch Wilee for traffic violations, which yields yet more cool footage of bike chases in traffic. But eventually he seems to realize that cops never do this, and he simply stops.
And Wilee? He’s literally just an errand boy who is doing a job for someone he barely knows for $30. Why does he bother? At one point he decides he doesn’t even want this gig and returns the package, so the movie reboots. Sigh.
Director and co-writer David Koepp is a master screenwriter whose credits include “Jurassic Park,” “Carlito’s Way” and “Spider-Man,” so it’s puzzling that what we’re watching wouldn’t even make an acceptable first draft.
The ticket in the messenger’s envelope is worth $50,000, but not to Wilee. It’s important to someone else, but she’s a boring, passive subsidiary character, and anyway, the ultimate problem is an immigration issue.
Couldn’t an immigration problem be as easily solved at 7:01 p.m. as at 7? If not, why would someone wait till 5:30 to tackle the crisis? Not that it’s likely that a biker could be knocked unconscious in Midtown at 6:33, take an ambulance ride, get out of the ambulance, make his way miles uptown to a police tow yard, steal two bikes and pedal back down to Chinatown in 27 minutes. And I’m still trying to figure out why a guy picking up a package at 116th and Broadway and headed downtown would instead next be found half a mile north, under the elevated train at about 125th Street.
The only reason is that Koepp likes the look of that area, but if you’re going to keep updating the action with graphics telling us exactly which block each one is, you can hardly protest that the audience thinks you’re paying attention to detail.
Koepp throws in a love interest (a fellow courier, Vanessa, played as a routine sassy chick by Dania Ramirez) and a rival for her affections (Wolé Parks). But this isn’t much of a love triangle since she obviously prefers Wilee, and the plot veers off course yet again when the two guys have a race in Central Park. This is supposed to be a life-and-death chase movie, not two friends messing around. Did “Star Wars” interrupt the climax to show us Han and Luke racing X-wings?