The timing of Push seemed to muddy it’s appeal even more than it’s tired story. Color me jaded but after three Matrix movies, three X-Men movies and four really bad seasons of Heroes, I am no longer impressed with human beings using telekinesis and psionics to move inanimate objects and see into the future. For a movie to present the same formula of “special human beings” it would need to have an extremely powerful story behind it in order for it to work. I think that I, like most movie lovers, expect a bit more than “look they can do freaky things” in order to appreciate this setup from now on. What the Wachowski brothers did with The Matrix was to set a bar so high that every other movie like this will run a comparison to and eventually fall short of it if the story isn’t there. See with The Matrix and arguably the first season of Heroes, it was the story that kept us locked in. It was the feeling of “whoa I wonder where this is going”. Unfortunately I felt as if Push started out as a mighty shove, peaking my interest, that ended up in a weak nudge by the time the credits rolled.
Rife with plot holes and a pace that will have you reaching for an espresso to stay awake. Push presents an interesting tale of Nazi experiments (of course), government agencies and a society of mutants that I will call psionics for this review. These psionics, a term I use loosely because they originated from psychic people, have varying powers such as telekinesis, mind control, psychic visions and deafening screams. Each power is associated with a nickname such as “mover” for a telekinetic person and “watcher” for a psychic, which would have been a good idea had they not decided to tell us only half of the names associated with the powers. The theme of a society hunting down the special people to run experiments on them seems pretty cliché having experienced it in Heroes and Jumper. Though through all of my complaints, the biggest one I do have is the overall lull of the pacing that makes it seem worse than it really is.
Dakota Fanning plays Cassie an alcoholic 13 yr old watcher that teams up with Nick (Chris Evans) to find Kira (Camille Belle) in order to save their lives. The reason they must find Kira is the mystery that defines the movie as they avoid Chinese gangsters and the mysterious Harvey Carver (Djimon Honsou). If there is anything good for me to say about the movie, I will say that all of the actors involved tried their damnedest to make this a watchable movie. It starts out so promising that it becomes almost depressing seeing it fall off so rapidly by the time it ends. The problem is, it felt as if the writer David Bourla was trying in vain to make it overly complicated. The scheme that the heroes create and follow through to outwit the bad guys is so incoherent and unlikely, it over complicates things and confuses the viewer.
Not a movie I would recommend to the cinephile, but the average movie-goer will find it interesting no doubt. While I found it overlong, contrived and a bit of a disappointment, it is not to say that it didn’t at least have hope. In an alternate universe where The Matrix, Heroes and X-Men doesn’t exist, a film like Push is a masterpiece. However in this universe, it comes off as a copycat in a secondhand costume, trying his best to be taken seriously.
Written by Greg Dragon – who has written 364 reviews on Spicy Movie Dogs.
Cinephile and opinion writer, Greg Dragon has been a fan of movies since the 80's when Kung Fu theater was all the rage and Roger Moore was James Bond. As an opinion writer that has reviewed Box Office releases on a number of prominent websites, Greg is the founder and lead critic of Spicy Movie Dogs.
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