The pReview Re-viewing of..
Premium Rush
CLICK THE TITLE TO VIEW THE TRAILER IN A SEPARATE WINDOW
(it is highly recommended to view the trailer and THEN read!)
(warning: Contains high octane bicycling.. And cursing and partial nudity.)
by Jeff Finck
written: 7/17/2012
Release Date: August 24, 2012
The premise: Hidden just beneath the surface of New York City lies a dark society.. A cadre of sheer athleticism powered and fueled entirely by an elite peloton of cyclists out for one thing: Your convenience. Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a New York City bike messenger with a penchant for getting the job done fast, quick, and other synonyms for fast and quick. When he picks up a package from Columbia University, the corrupt Officer Bobby (Michael Shannon) races all over the city tracking Wilee down.. Presumably because the package contains an early edition of the Daily Spectator and Officer Bobby NEEDS to know what summer hot spots made the A&E editor's must-visit list! Spoiler alert: The Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and Grand Central make the cut. Not on the list: Saint Augustine's Church Slave Galleries, the insane asylum secret tunnels under Columbia University, and Crazy Larry's Rape Alley.
If you've ever lived in a city, you know what a pain in all of your dicks it is to drive your car anywhere. Seriously, go downtown in any major city during rush hour and see how long it takes you to not have six aneurysms in a row.. That amount of time is what I refer to as a Sharon Stone because it's quick, and then you just fucking die. One of the handiest inventions for getting around all of the automotive joy-cursing, in the world, has got to be the ability to mock gravity by riding around on a thinly framed suicide machine made from two wheels and a bucketful of angular momentum. Wilee is a bicycle lover. He drones on about his bike as if he just bought a new car.. Or just had a kid.. Or like he just started a band.. Or how he owns a blog about movie trailer reviews.. But then backs it up with an array of skill by weaving in and out of traffic like Speedy Gonzales playing dodgeball at the University of California at Irvine. Except instead of dodging 800 balls, he begins dodging 8,000 moving vehicles.. Which is impressive until he ends up getting thrown out by one of the bigger fellas. And by "thrown" I of course mean, "struck by a moving car." And by "out" I mean, "knocked the fuck out."
The aforementioned accident happened at around 6:33pm, and so, some much needed back story is relayed to us, the viewer.. Of the story.. And soon the back story.. Here we go: At 5:17pm that same day, that guy from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart hires Wilee to pick up a package and says that the package is a.. Premium Rush. HE JUST SAID THE NAME OF THE MOVIE IN THE TRAILER!!!! FUCK YES!!!! Okay.. Sorry about that. Mind blowing inter-movie title-dropping explodes my uterus through my nose. (No offense to women or Lord Voldemort.. it's just an expression. Calm down.)
En route to the package, Vanessa (Dania Ramirez) checks in with our hero and has a tussle with one of New York City's most necessary evils to show us what a boss she is. No, I am not referring to trendy fucks from Murray Hill.. I mean cabbies. Vanessa then chain rapes a cabbie's side mirror and proceeds to turn Wilee on with the verbal abuse she dishes out into his ear piece. Ignoring his bike boner, he lets her know that he's actually a busy messenger and continues on his mission unfazed. Upon arriving at the pick-up spot, Wilee then tethers his bike to a tree like he's effing Lazarus from Black Snake Moan. To be fair, it does have to learn to stop letting men treat it like a piece of sexual meat.. And when it does, it don’t get no chain no more.
5:33pm rolls around and Wilee finally reaches Columbia U to pick up his package. Jamie Chung plays Nima, a.. Student..? ..At Columbia. She needs her package to get to its destination by 7pm or else it will turn into a pumpkin! Or.. Explode? What other movie ultimatums are there? Aliens will invade.. The bus will explode.. The clones will wake up.. Pure evil will land on Earth.. The Ancient Ones will awaken.. Columbia University will blow up.. The Death Star will reach its kill range.. The robots will become self-aware.. The Nazis are going to activate (insert ancient relic).. My point is, he better fucking move! Nima shares one more uneasy glance, drops a separate package on the street and then disappears from the trailer like a way more Asian Amelia Earhart.
Tensions run high and curiosity sets in as to where Wilee has gotten himself to. Well, at 5:48pm, he has a run in with crooked Officer Bobby. Bobb-o plays up like he's the one that sent the envelope and needs it back.. But J Gordy Leevsy (I apologize) lets him know what's up: Once the package goes in the bag, it stays in the bag. You know.. Until.. Like.. It gets to its intended destination. Or else it isn't so much like delivering packages for the customer's convenience, as it is delivering confounding mysteries to people you just want to annoy. Wilee attempts to move on, but Bobby wants satisfaction and subtly suggests that if Wilee doesn't give him the package, he's going to replace Wilee's collar bones with his bike's handlebars and then ride him so hard that he'll wish he'd been born without a limbic system.
Wilee breaks free and high tails it out of there like he's Daniel Dhers running from a haircut. (Seriously, though, click his name and watch that video to the end.. He pulls off the greatest BMX trick known to man) After finding some sanctuary in a men's room stall (Aren't we all just looking for sanctuary in a men's room stall?), Wilee breaks Frank's third rule of transporting: Don't open the package. It turns out to just be a tiny piece of paper. That's not so bad. Not too much to get upset about. I mean, in the history of government conspiracy movies, when has a small, fragile item with essential information attached to it ever really been all that important?
Apparently the package is extremely important because Bobby McGee calls down fucking everyone: He sics corrupt cops on him, regular cops, apathetic traffic, gravity, smoke, an underground club full of Asians, and, apparently, at one point, I'm pretty sure that I saw a hatless Oddjob from Goldfinger..
I should mention that the trailer has been interspersed with the best filler text known to man.. "In New York City.. When everything is riding on you.. Anything can happen. Every second counts. Every move matters. In 2012.. Ride.. Like.. Hell." Bike riding wordplay aside, the rest of the trailer is crammed full of high energy chases, car crashes, bike tricks, lazy Susans, Milky Way fan girls (the galaxy, not the candy bar), a noticeable lack of Terrence Howard, cottage cheese nipples, allusions to Wilee/Vanessa sexy time, constipation, Olivia Newton Long-Johns, and one very worried, constantly emoting, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.. Oh.. And someone about to have an extremely bad day:
Before we close this out, it should be noted that there is a relative swelling in the "I call bullshit" department of the internet.. Which is.. Uhmm.. Basically, the whole fucking internet, I guess.. But I digress. A very similar sounding movie called Quicksilver was released in 1986. Quicksilver featured Kevin Bacon saving every bike messenger in the world by cutting a rug and punch dancing his rage out at the bad guys. I have a feeling that Premium Rush, though probably containing less dance moves, is going to succeed in every facet that Quicksilver failed us all so very long ago. Even in 2008, Kevin Bacon said that it was "the absolute lowest point of my career." And at that point, he had already starred in Beauty Shop. Again, I digress. I remember the first time that I watched the trailer for Premium Rush, I felt like a kid again! Like I was witnessing someone steal Pee-wee's bike all over again, except this time, thrust it graphically into an action movie.. Or like watching the other 1986 classic bike movie, Rad, get thrown 150 miles an hour into the face of the video game Mirror's Edge. I am so excited about this flick that I'm going to go out, buy a bike and then fling myself down city streets like an Amish Evel Knievel. STUNT IT!