Push

"Two young Americans with special abilities must race to find a girl in Hong Kong before a shadowy government organization called Division does."

     I first saw this movie when it was in theatres this past winter, and recently picked it up on DVD. So for those of you who don't know, this movie is about rogue psychics trying to evade "Division" and more specifically about Nick (Evans) and Cassie (Fanning) trying to keep each other from ending up very dead. The movie takes place in Hong Kong entirely as indicated above, and involves a lot of gunslinging, psychic battles, and destruction throughout Hong Kong. The title of the movie comes from the nickname for one type of psychic, Pushers. Pushers can 'push' people they make eye contact with, altering their memories and making them believe things that aren't true. Kira, Nick's old girlfriend, is one such psychic, whereas he is a mover (telekinetic) and Cassie is a watcher (can predict the future). I won't go through the whole plot, but it's full of twists and turns and honestly does a good job of being clever (in my opinion).

    I know a lot of people who had nasty things to say about this movie, about how it was boring, or stupid, the usual fare that doesn't seem to pick at anything specific. I personally thought it was a pretty good movie, for a few big reasons.

      The first is that it was an original intellectualy property. It wasn't a remake of a tv show from the 70s, it wasn't a reimagining of some other movie or a sequel and it wasn't a freaking comic book movie. Don't get me wrong, some comic book movies are pretty damned good, but movie makers have discovered that everyone is bonkers for comic book movies so lets make nothing but those!

     Anyway I felt like there was pretty decent screen chemistry between the characters, just not the characters that I think the movie intended. Camilla Belle (Kira) and Chris Evans (Nick) have pretty much zero chemistry. They're romantic interests and the movie is clearly trying to imply that the two are soulmates or something, but you get the impression that Carver's push was the truth, and they met each other at the beginning of the damned movie. Nick and Dakota Fanning's character Cassie on the other hand have a whole lot of screen chemistry. They have a kind of little sister/big brother thing that works really well. 

     Besides that I found the idea of the movie well executed. The psychics use their powers in interesting, creative ways, and despite all the science fiction, no one does anything totally stupid in this movie to break the illusion. The same goes for the plot: it succeeds in being both original and coherent, and I honestly was surprised by the ending the first time I saw it. I can easily recommend this movie, and suggest going into it with an open mind. At any rate it's a movie with Chris Evans in it that isn't Fantastic Four, so that's pretty great all by itself.