Push
2009
Starring: Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle, Djimon Hounsou, Neil Jackson, Maggie Siff, Cliff Curtis
Director: Paul McGuigan
Runtime: 111 Minutes
Distributor: Summit Entertainment
Rating: PG-13

NBC’s Heroes has a lot to answer for. It wasn’t the first story to mine the idea of ordinary people with extraordinary abilities, nor was it even the best (go rent USA Network’s The 4400 and thank us later). It was however the one that broke the idea to the mainstream and showed that the superhero angle had appeal beyond 40-year-old fat dudes living in their parent’s basement. So along with that show we’re regularly treated to the likes of Wanted, Jumper, and now Push, that talk the talk but seem to uniformly agree that building the kind of rich, solid mythology the likes of Batman and Spiderman were built on is just waaayyy too much of a bother.

Instead we get the ever-impressive Dakota Fanning (one of the few pluses on offer), who, as Watcher Cassie, delivers a lengthy set-up speech about Nazi experiments and secret agencies and the many different classifications of abilities: Pushers (mind control), Watchers (clairvoyants), Stitches (psychic healers) etc. Movers, she explains, “is just a fancy way of saying telekinetic,” which only begs the question as to why they don’t just call them telekinetics then? Because, of course, that veers too uncomfortably close to the fat, virgin guys in the basements again. It’s a speech so long that you begin to wonder if she’ll in fact just tell us how the movie ends and save us two hours – sadly no such luck.

Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Feature Films, Reviews, Sci-Fi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.