When YouTube was still in its infancy, some of the earliest viral videos I remember watching were bicyclists doing trick moves to hop up steep inclines and thread the needle in tough to reach places.
It was parkour… but with bikes!
And you know what I always thought those videos were missing? Bumbling cops chasing these daredevils for absurd comic relief.
Thankfully, “Premium Rush” delivers.
And “delivers” is the right word, because “Premium Rush” is about that most loved of all groups of people, bike couriers. Yes, now those annoying people who you just want to run over in traffic (unless they’re bringing you your Jimmy Johns) have their own movie dedicated to making you wish you were as constantly amped as they are.
Wilee (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is of course the most amped and psychotic of all the super cool hipsters riding fixies with no brakes down busy New York streets. He’s unaware that he’s delivering an envelope that for all intensive purposes is worth $50,000, so along the way he’s being chased by a corrupt New York cop (Michael Shannon) with a gambling debt.
The actual plot revolving around why this Macguffin matters is way too serious for a movie this silly. The remainder of the film involves bike chases to an indie rock soundtrack (is that Sleigh Bells?) and special effects that make the movie play like a Sprint 4G commercial.
Wilee has this internal GPS that allows him to Google Map Street View his way through oncoming traffic, and he has hilarious ways of imagining his death or an equally bad accident (“My baby!”) as though he were the Allstate Mayhem guy. It also allows him to wheelie over parked cars and run circles around cops who can’t seem to catch him on foot, bikes or cars.
But “Premium Rush” would be nothing if it weren’t for the terrifically bananas performance by Michael Shannon. There’s maybe no actor today other than Nicolas Cage who can be as insanely nutjobbed as he can. Shannon acts like a doofusy Dean Vernon or Principal Ed Rooney trying to catch some subordinate punk kid calling him a douchebag. He’s hysterically sinister in a movie that would be unironically silly without him.
Luckily, “Premium Rush” is self-aware of its stupidity and is good, sleek, popcorn fun at the movies. Ride your bike to the multiplex and save on gas money.
3 stars