'Premium Rush': A Fun Little Ride

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's bike-messenger chase movie is a diverting summer trifle.

Sony

I believe the world can be divided into three distinct populations: bike messengers; people who have never shared a road with bike messengers; and people who have done so and, as a result, can't stand bike messengers. Given the size of this final cohort, it was an act of some bravery for the filmmakers behind Premium Rush to make their hero, yes, a bike messenger. The ugly reminders are all right up there on the screen: the mortal swerves amid traffic, the red lights run, the multi-car pileups initiated, the routine terrorization of motorists and pedestrians alike.

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Of course, unlike the bike messenger in question, none of these innocent bystanders is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so he's got that going for him. Gordon-Levitt stars as Wilee—nicknamed, inevitably, "the coyote"—a twentysomething whose choice of profession, current unemployment figures notwithstanding, is a consequence of enthusiasm, not necessity. A graduate of Columbia Law School, Wilee has nonetheless eschewed the bar in favor of the bike—specifically, a stripped down, fixed-gear steel frame with no brakes. (He argues that they cause more accidents than they prevent; I can only hope that the attorneys at Columbia Pictures are well prepared for a future class-action suit.)

Co-written and directed by screenplay superstar David Koepp, Premium Rush is slight to the point of evanescence. Wiley is given an envelope to deliver that is More Than It Seems and winds up being chased around Manhattan by a dirty cop (Michael Shannon) who wants its contents. Thrown into the mix are a bike-messenger ex-girlfriend (Dania Ramirez), a bike-messenger competitor for her affections (Wole Parks), a bike-cop (Christopher Place), a Columbia student with a secret (Jamie Chung), and a couple of Chinese gangsters.

As cited in the film, the term "premium rush" is shorthand for an especially well-compensated delivery. But the primary purposes of the title seem to be to advertise Wilee's adrenal addiction to urban biking, to hope that we will share his zeal, and to invite intellectual-property lawsuits.

Judged against its modest ambitions, the movie is successful in a straightforward, middle-concept, Cellular kind of way. Like that early Chris Evans vehicle, Premium Rush doesn't aim terribly high but manages to hit its marks with reasonable accuracy. Gordon-Levitt is his typical likable self. Shannon plays a villain more pitiable than frightening, a compulsive gambler who sneers and whinges his way through the film in a nasal, vaguely Cagneyesque tenor. And there are many, many scenes of people riding bicycles with extreme prejudice. Arguably best of all, the movie completes its delivery in a swift 91 minutes. Throwing "premium" into the title may be overselling such a trifling entertainment. But for the cinematically discounted days of late summer, it's a perfectly diverting little ride.

About the Author

Christopher Orr is a senior editor and the principal film critic at The Atlantic. He has written on movies for The New Republic, LA Weekly, Salon, and The New York Sun, and has worked as an editor for numerous publications.

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”