Results

The last thing Jerry McFadyen saw before his car jackknifed into a telephone pole was a street mime trying to break out of his invisible box.

Here’s the best part about being a film geek: you can become genuinely excited about the stupidest things, and it profoundly impacts the way you see a movie.  Like a certain actor showing up.  They don’t even have to do a good job; the quality of the performance may even be tertiary to your glee.  You’re just amped that they showed up.  Push is full of faces that bring me joy; joy for no other purpose than to know that they are getting work in troubled economic times.  Even if times weren’t troubled, I’d be happy these actors were working, so that I could just soak up their onscreen charisma from my theater seat like a roly-poly incubus.

Cliff Curtis is in this movie.  I didn’t even know that going in.  I’m just sitting there, minding my own business, trying to give due attention to the rather tepid story about superpowered folks in Hong Kong, when Cliff Curtis just shows up as a guy who can temporarily transmute matter.  He’s been in quite a few movies, mostly in flimsy supporting parts.  But you remember him.  You raise an index finger, smile to yourself, and whisper, “Hey, that’s the one dude from Sunshine!” or perhaps, “He was the father in Whale Rider!” and, if you’re like me, “Uh, wasn’t that guy in Deep Rising?”

If you can’t call this a cast of Who’s Who, maybe you can call it an ensemble of Should Be.  Ming-na Wen, Scott Michael Campbell, Djimon Honsou, Nate Mooney, Camilla Belle, Neil Jackson — even Colin Ford, a talented young actor who’s done a preternaturally good job playing young Sam Winchester on Supernatural.  These are all people you probably know from somewhere.  Honsou, of course, is an Oscar-nominated thespian who has worked with Steven Spielberg, Jim Sheridan, Ed Zwick, and Ridley Scott.¹  Controlling and lithe, Honsou is always entirely at ease in his roles, even if he brings a tempestuous presence to the chemistry onscreen.  He’s a great Everyman, he’s a great villain;  he’s just great to watch.  He magnetizes everyone around him.  He even jump-started Keanu Reeves in a scant couple of scenes from Constantine.  Dogging him around Push is Jackson, a telekinetic (dubbed a “mover” in the film’s somewhat lame super-jargon for that power).  Skulking or striding about the frame in tightly regimented movements, jaw and eyes firmly fixed, he imparts volumes about the discipline with which he has mastered and developed his powers, as well as the monastic life he probably leads.

They’re all great.  The whole film rests on the shoulders of a pair of bona fide stars who hover somewhere uncertainly between the A and B lists.  None have singlehandedly opened a film at #1, but their faces are recognizable, and they have been working steadily for the better part of a decade to build their reputations as commercially viable — yet artistically dedicated — actors.  Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning are as terrific a duo as the screenplay allows.  (And it doesn’t allow much wiggle room.)  Push’s make-or-break scene showcases a drunk Fanning bitching out a roomful of people twice her size with all the ‘tude of a pint-size Jake LaMotta.  (Comparatively pint-sized, anyway.)

Billed as an f/x-driven action extravaganza, this really is more a display window for a cast of extremely watchable actors than anything else.  Aside from the obvious Heroes parallels (plainclothes superheroes), a more direct antecedent is Chow Yun-Fat’s U.S. debut.  Paul McGuigan does for comic book movies what Antoine Fuqua did for Hong Kong action flicks.  The Replacement Killers hit all the right poses; as an American approximation of what makes a HK movie a “HK movie,” it was a serviceable star vehicle.  Push attends to its slummy Hong Kong locales with an assiduous, neon grittiness that is still too hyperstylized to be “realistic,” but affects a Cantonese accent more plausibly than Fuqua’s L.A. takedown.

These aesthetic affections considerably help smooth over whatever dialogue atrocities the actors can’t overcome.  With titles like Doomsday Rock and Yesterday’s Target on his Imdb filmography,² David Bourla’s screenplay could have been the pilot NBC rejected in favor of the afore-mentioned Heroes.  The initial trailer led me to believe that it was based on a young adult novel, a la Twilight.  Most unfortunately, the narrative conceived by Bourla is apparently the first of a prospective series — which, judging from the box office returns, will never materialize.  This is a tragedy, because as an original (work with me on this one, ‘kay?) screenplay, I will never be able to read the books to find out how the story ends.  The rather tasteless final moments of this film don’t promise much, but the seeds planted earlier of a brother-sister relationship between Evans and Fanning (never explicitly foreshadowed, but c’mon — there’s no way they won’t turn out to be related) — the maybe-faked Evans/Belle romance (the least compelling aspect of the film; I’d lay money on Belle being cast after one of the casting directors’ aides saw Selma Blair in Hellboy), and the mystery surrounding Fanning’s imprisoned mum all hold the potential to be mildly engaging pulp.    A quick ghost rewrite by John August, Joss Whedon, or David Goyer would probably plug a few of the more major leaks.

There’s so little to say about a movie that itself offers so little, but remains diverting through the sheer chemistry of its principal players.  Even McGuigan has made a bit of a name for himself in the U.S. with uber-derivative thrillers that are so doggone fierce about owning their influences that he may be the most Tarantino-esque journeyman in the business — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Without Tarantino’s tendency to knit a quilt from the lint he so lovingly plucked from his oft-gazed navel, McGuigan attaches no significance to his anti-style.  His obsession is basic, visceral “wow.”  Like any good hired gun, he just lets his stars smolder and ignite (if they’re up to it), and tries to camouflage the vapidity of the story with good, old-fashioned camera tricks and Hollywood glitz.  When Push comes to shove, it’s is a pretty terrible movie, but extremely well-done.  Not enough to hookwink me entirely, but like the by-god stubborn townsfolk who rallied to Prof. Harold Hill’s defense when they realized that they’d had a little fun from his con games, a cheap thrill like this ain’t as offensive as it probably should be.

Edited by David Jordan.

___________________________________