Push is one of those flicks that is marginally better than the sum of its parts. Taken individually, the story is derivative, the dialogue forced, and the effects routine. What nudges Push slightly above the average for fugitive superhero movies, which, for the sake of perspective, let us define as last year’s middling Jumper, are the depth of the bench, the striking Hong Kong settings, and the quality of the lead actors. Now, don’t get me wrong. Push is at best an imperfect rendering. It badly over-plots itself at the end. It wavers uncomfortably between the straightforward actioner it wants to be and the hip buzzfest it thinks it should be. And—perhaps worst of all—it doesn’t supply us with enough screen time backstory to make the inconclusive finale resonate.

            Still, on the whole, it is passable stuff.

            If you will remember, Jumper gave us the likable but lifetime B-lister Hayden Christiansen as David Rice, a carefree, some might say vapid, teleporter targeted for, well, termination by a homicidal nutcase named Roland Cox. Cox, played with barely suppressed rabidity by a bizarrely white haired Samuel L. Jackson, was the head huntsman for a fanatical anti-jumping religious cult called the Paladins. Paladins had persecuted jumpers (teleporters) for centuries, believing them to be abominations. Christiansen spends pretty much the entire film trying to get away from Cox and company. He is supported in this by tepid love interest Millie (Rachel Bilson) and maverick, every-man-for-himself jumper Griffin (Jamie Bell).

            Jumper is the ideal mean for the sub-genre because it doesn’t suck just as much as it doesn’t score. It failed with audiences and critics alike because there just wasn’t enough meat to the story, and there were simply too few interesting characters. Moreover, while the jumpers leapt with sometimes insane frequency from one place to another, they never stayed anywhere long enough for us, the popcorn tagalongs, to get invested in any one locale.

            Tyro director Paul McGuigan corrects these problems in Push.

            First, he has fleshed out a story with substance. The foundational premise is that Nazi supersoldier experimentation during World War II (and afterward, in some way that is never adequately explained) created hundreds, perhaps thousands, of psychically gifted individuals. Now, sixty years later, the descendants of that first generation, themselves empowered by heredity, are either living off the grid, or are regulated by Division, a clandestine arm of US Intelligence. These descendants have diversified over the decades. Some are Pushers: No, not superpowered street corner drug peddlers, but people who can use their minds to trick others into believing literally anything. Watchers can catch glimpses of a fluid, ever-shifting future. Movers are endowed with varying degrees of telekinesis. Sniffs can track anyone anywhere if they can just touch, taste or smell an article their quarry has handled. Telepathic hound dogs, if you like. Shadows prevent people or things from being found by Sniffs. Bleeders emit amplified sonic vibrations that burst the blood vessels of their victims (translation: they yell at the top of their lungs until you die). Shifters are master illusionists. Stitches can heal, or, if the mood strikes, harm with a touch of their hands. Wipers can erase memories. Suffice to say, the story presents a rich and complex tableau—much like Heroes, but without the immense build-up, and the bone-deep characterization.

            The movie opens with Kira, a captured Pusher who has been injected with a serum that will theoretically magnify her powers exponentially, escaping from Division’s fortified medical facility. Division, we are told by way of voice over, has developed the serum to create an army of invincible psychics. Needless to say, this particular branch of the American armed services is not all volunteer. Kira is the test subject to survive this treatment. In the course of her break, Kira manages to steal a spare vial of the serum. She flees with it to Hong Kong, which—happily, and not coincidentally—has a thriving underground network of disgruntled super-outcasts.

            The rest of the film deals with Division’s brutal attempts to retrieve the serum. They are anxious, you see, that it not fall into the wrong hands and be used to create an army of superfoes. And, as it happens, wrongs hands abound in Hong Kong. The worst of the lot is a triad run by an aging (but certainly not mellowing) Chinese Bleeder.

            Second, McGuigan has pumped more acting talent into this vehicle than anyone would have dreamed possible for a mid-budget SF shoot-em-up. He somehow convinced Dakota Fanning, currently out in theaters as the voice of Coraline in Neil Gaiman’s eponymous paean to childhood courage, to join the cast. Fanning plays Cassie, a tweenish Watcher who is chasing Kira and the serum because she has foreseen they will help her rescue her legendary but perpetually off-screen mother; a mother who is—by the way—reputed to be the world’s greatest living Watcher. We do glimpse mom, from the back. That is her shuffling form being led off down the hall in the hospital at the very beginning. Mom is being held in drugged captivity by Division in the very same facility Kira just bolted out of. In fact, mom plays a crucial role (or perhaps I should say roll) in that escape.

            Fanning, all of fourteen going on fifteen, is already an accomplished dramatic actress. Her half-urchin, half-young woman performance displays much of the same tough vulnerability Jodie Foster showed us as Iris in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, just without the sordid backdrop of the streets.

            Not many actresses too young for high school could make running through the underground ferry connection tunnels and the steaming bazaars of the Hong Kong waterfront in a frilly but semi-punk get-up look natural. Fanning pulls it off without a smirk. Her Cassie is tormented by the butterfly effect curse of her gift: even seemingly innocent, throw-away actions can subtly (and silently) alter the future. Therefore, if she does not constantly force herself to look ahead, over and over again, she ends up working off bad numbers, so to speak. Put another way, her ability is no Golden Compass. While not precisely fallible, it is almost capricious in the randomness of its operation.

            Chris Evans, who is already in the cinema superhero pantheon for his testosterone-fueled turn as Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four franchise, again proves he is better than we remember. His Nick Gant is the central character of the movie. Nick is a Mover, and a textbook reluctant hero. Unschooled in his abilities. Living in near-squalor in a vast labyrinth of truly astounding tenements in Kowloon. Rough around the edges, careworn, unsure of himself or his capabilities, but basically decent, Nick is a superheroic everyman—just better looking than most.

            Cassie’s sketchbook, a tablet in which she draws primitive interpretations of her visions, and which has something of a mind of its own, instructs her to track Nick down. After an industry-standard number of attempted brush-offs, he caves and the two of them set off on a kaleidoscopic romp through the pulsing, living heart of Hong Kong in search of Kira. During this headlong tumble, they—almost more by happenstance than design—wind up enlisting a veritable Sharky’s Machine of psychic expatriates to help.

            New Zealander Cliff Curtis, always top quality, stands out as Hook Waters, a suave night club Shifter who turns the materials at hand into just what he needs for the moment; the perfect playing card, the right denomination paper bill, and so forth. It is, sans the science fictional element, the kind of role Robert Vaughn defined in the sixties, and—in one of the great below-the-radar comebacks—has returned to in AMC’s delectable crime caper TV show Hustle. Believe me, Curtis is more than up to the comparison. He is a fine actor, with exactly the right bearing for the part; casual assurance, a hint of menace, and a devastating smile. You may recall him from 2002's towering Whale Rider. He was the disillusioned Maori living in Europe; the artist who comes home against his better judgment.

            Ming-Na, the dependable actress from Macau who portrayed Dr. Chen on ER for nine years, is Emily Hu, a good-hearted but gun-shy Sniffer who at first desperately does not want to help—but is drawn in despite herself.

            10,000 B.C.’s Camilla Belle, as the Sphinx-eyed, Cleopatra-coiffed Kira, Nate Mooney, a relative unknown, as wisecracking Shadow Pinky Stein, Dijimon Hounsou as the bad-guy-in-chief and Pusher, Agent Carver, and, Mad Men’s Maggie Siff as Stowe, an immoral Healer, round out the cast.

            Belle is the only truly weak link. Her Kira seems incapable of expressing any feelings whatsoever. Love, hate, disgust, elation, contempt, even boredom—all of that is strangely (and regrettably) beyond her ken. She is an empty vessel. Which is too bad. Belle might not have won any awards for her part in 10,000 B.C., but she at least acted like a human being.  I can only hope this was a directorial flub; that she was given a mandate to play it like a manikin.

            The rest are good, but Mooney and Siff shine. Mooney has outstanding comic timing. Watch for him in the years ahead. Siff, a Sean Young lookalike—with all the sexual creepiness that term encompasses, could teach night classes in porcelain depravity.

            Finally, and perhaps most gloriously, McGuinan gives the characters a city to play in. His Hong Kong is a seething urbanscape of fish markets, sampans, ferry boats, cavernous restaurants, side street Buddhist sanctuaries, bamboo scaffolding, elevated playgrounds, and eye-popping honeycombs of apartment buildings. Real stuff. Shot in real time. With a lot of real people. This is not quite the colossal, multi-tiered Rio de Janeiro Edward Norton retreats to in last year’s remake (or continuation, if you prefer) of The Incredible Hulk. That city was so serpentine, so intricate and so staggeringly different, it could have been on another planet, built by aliens. But this Hong Kong is close.

            All that sounds good, and, to a certain extent, it is.

            Yet, I cannot sit here and tell you with a straight face that the film clicks on all levels. This is no classic. What it is, is a solid effort. Understand that and you will be satisfied. Expect more, and, well, don’t point fingers at me when you are walking back to your car in a funk.

            There is no chemistry whatsoever between purported lovers Nick (Evans) and Kira (Belle). In fact, the love story element of the film is so feeble it actually works against the two  characters, making them look alternately foolish and outright sociopathic. By the end, I had concluded Nick actually belonged with Cassie, despite the fact she was in her early teens. It seemed saner and safer to me that he wait for her to grow up than stick it out with the eerily androidish Kira.

            The effects are merely serviceable—people rolling around on ceilings, objects being levitated, and so forth— but one expects more these days. They should either have been scaled back to afford for more story development, or heavily enhanced, not left somewhere in the middle.

            David Bourla’s screenplay, while clever, even witty at times, has a tendency toward murkiness—which does not help once the final con is in full swing.

            As I said up front, the film over-complicates itself in its closing quarter. Part of the problem is we the viewers are forced to take at face value a host of suppositions that are never clarified. Secondly, in its rush to give us a nifty ending, replete with twists, turns, bells, and whistles, the film loses us.

            The underlying gimmick is appealing, but its logic staggers under the dead weight of the convolutions piled on top of it. Think of The Sting, but without George Roy Hill’s rock-solid guiding hand.

            Bottom line: generally good acting, and a deeper-than-expected story, argue in Push’s favor, but blasé effects, and a hopelessly byzantine final act, substantially weaken its appeal. See it if you are a dyed-in-the-wool fan of the fugitive superhero sub-genre. Otherwise, stay away.        

Summit Entertainment
U.S. Release Date: February 6, 2009
Director: Paul McGuignan
Screen writer: David Bourla
Running Time: 111 minutes