Push Review

Published by Jeff Leins on: February 15th, 2009

Push is this year’s Jumper, a science-fiction mess that squanders the potential of its super powers with sloppy storytelling and boring characters.  It’s the worst parts of “Heroes” (season two) stretched to feature length before charging full ticket price.

Chris Evans as Nick and Camilla Belle as Kira are blander than even the flat Hayden Christensen and their romance angle even duller.  Meanwhile, the cute TV cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere) is replaced with 14-year-old Dakota Fanning.  You’ll need special abilities to care about any of them.

What’s sad is Fanning is the only one showing any talent in the bunch, delivering a mature performance amidst the chaotic plot and shaky action cam.  Her character’s inherited precognitive ability allows Cassie (Fanning) and the ragtag group of paranormal kids to see future boring encounters set to tough guy dialogue and over-the-top style.

Kira breaks her way out of medical lockdown before meeting up with Nick and Cassie in Hong Kong, and together they embark on an ambiguous quest to battle the forces of evil… whoever that is.

Maybe writers haven’t realized it yet, but what makes a good superhero movie is a solid villain.  Of course most people root for the hero (or heroes), but secretly audiences want that cool bad guy.  A sinister creep with just the right amount of evil or awesome abilities.  Take a look at the most successful superhero movie of all time, The Dark Knight.  The public focus wasn’t on Batman, it was on the Joker.  Granted, some might say Heath Ledger’s untimely death contributed to the curiosity, but it doesn’t explain the second most popular character: Two Face.  The Spider-Man series was the same way.  Classic villains for epic encounters.  On the other hand, Daredevil’s Bullseye was beyond lame, Catwoman didn’t even have a villain, and I’d be surprised if you could remember the antagonist in Elektra.  A great villain makes or breaks a superhero movie.

In Push, the villains aren’t bad, everything else is.  The heroes are running from (toward?) a quasi-government organization called Division.  This experimental group sends out “Sniffers” to hunt down the escaped girl, which are basically grown men shoving their noses into household items (like dogs) to get a sense of where they’ve been.  No one should be particularly frightened of two suited guys smelling a toothbrush.  Or the “bleeders,” a family of mutants capable of exploding glass, wood, and brains by shrieking extra loud.  Though I think my sister may have that hidden talent…

But the main baddie is Division Agent Henry Carver (Djimon Hounsou), a “Pusher” capable of implanting thoughts, emotions, and memories into the minds of his victims.  It may sound pretty evil, but when Hounsou dispatches people by stopping and staring at them it just looks ridiculous.  In fact, the coolest part about Carver is his sidekick, a Division “Mover” who “pushes” objects around the room.  I know, it’s unnecessarily confusing, try to keep up.

But even the showdown involving the “Mover” and Nick’s own suddenly controllable telekinetic powers looks cheap and unimaginative.  Here are two men able to control any object with their mind and they’re carefully floating guns across the room.  It reminded me of another Summit Entertainment battle, the climax of Twillight in all its low-budget cheesiness.

For a sci-fi action movie that relies on special effects to “push” the poorly-written story along, none of it is any good.  The science and fiction are an uninspired hodgepodge ripped from a variety of other sources, the action is sporadic and chaotic, and the special effects recycled and scattered randomly.  I wish someone was able to push the memory of this movie from my head.

1.5 out of 5.