By Megan Bianco
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Shannon are having a pretty good year. Gordon-Levitt played a surprisingly important character in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, and Shannon has his second feature with indie darling Jeff Nichols Mud and the third season of television’s “Boardwalk Empire” this fall. And currently in theaters, the two are playing a game of cat and mouse in Sony Pictures’ Premium Rush.
On what appears to be a regular summer afternoon in New York City, a bike messenger named Wilee (Gordon-Levitt) randomly becomes a target for a high-strung police detective (Shannon) after receiving a white envelope marked for “premium rush” expedited delivery. From then on it’s a fast-paced, death-defying chase between the biker, the cop, Wilee’s girlfriend (Dania Ramirez), Wilee’s messenger rival (Wolé Parks) and the white envelope recipient (Jamie Chung).
Directed by Mission: Impossible (1996) and Panic Room (2002) screenwriter David Koepp and co-written by Koepp and John Kamps of Zathura (2005), Premium Rush is a strictly visual movie with lots of quick cuts, special effects, flashbacks and a catchy soundtrack that keeps moviegoers entertained throughout the 90-minute ride. The dialogue and characters are rather basic, but the editing and cinematography serve almost as a cinematic tour guide of New York with enough action to keep viewers intrigued and on the edge of their seats to the end.
